FST Graduate Research Topic

Research Topic: Cognitive engagement detection analyzing forum posts of online learners
Suggested By: Ali Dewan
Last Update: April 17th, 2025

Online course discussion forums play a vital role in connecting students with their peers, exchanging ideas, opinions, and information. These forums are not only the main point of contact for the students, but also help instructors to track and check students’ learning. A key factor to improve students’ learning is their cognitive engagement. The main objective of this research is to identify and monitor students’ cognitive engagement by analyzing forum posts in online courses. This research investigates different computational linguistic models, cognitive science, and psychology concepts alongside deep learning (DL), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to achieve this goal. The specific research questions (RQs) that we aim to address: (RQ1) To what level are the students cognitively engaged in course forums? (RQ2) What are the key factors in a forum post that can help to identify cognitive engagement with a high accuracy? (RQ3) What models and approaches can be used to identify cognitive engagement in course forum? (RQ4) How does cognitive engagement evolves with respect to topic changes in a course over time? (RQ5) What is the relationship between the students’ cognitive engagement and academic achievement? The proposed research study aims to identify cognitive engagement by analyzing posts in course discussion forums.