Exploring Assessment of Critical Thinking Learning Outcomes in Online Higher Education

Online education has grown to more than 6 million students with an average age of 33 years old (Kolowich, 2012; Selingo, 2012; Sheehy, 2012). Research indicates online programs are part of many institutions' strategic planning initiatives. Institutions are undergoing increased scrutiny from accrediting bodies, employers, and adult learners. To remain competitive and valid in this changing environment, a significant issue for leaders of online higher education institutions is how to effectively assess online cognitive learning outcomes, such as critical thinking. Adding to the challenge of online assessment of critical thinking is the contextual nature of critical thinking and two differing approaches to assessment. Leaders of online higher education institutions should seek a critical thinking assessment that is based on a theoretical framework of Transformative Learning and Adult Learning Theories. This is explored in this chapter.

Questioning

Questioning and dialogue provide a framework for sharing educational objectives with students and for charting their progress. However, such an approach can generate feedback information that can be used by students to enhance learning and achievement. Moreover, the feedback generated from good “questioning and dialogue” could help tutors realign their teaching in response to the needs of learners. Organisations or institutions of learning, which integrate productive questioning and dialogue as part of their classroom practices and commitments to students, provide enhanced meaningful connections between what their students are studying and the relevance both their thinking and their knowledge has in comprehending life issues and solving problems. Drawing on qualitative research perspectives and adopting an embedded case study strategy, this chapter addresses the following questions: What are the connections between good questioning and student learning and achievement? What conscious knowledge and beliefs do tutors hold about productive questioning in their classes? The study findings indicate that learners need to be motivated to ask questions and encouraged to get involved in discussions. Tutors should consider “think-pair share strategy” in their classroom delivery.

When Our Changing Society Meets the Social Media Era

The rapid growth and the popularity of Social Network Sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of millions of students for many different purposes. The chapter reviews the background of the current social media research in relation to the international literature and tackles the most important findings. The practical part of the chapter outlines the results of a survey on social media services. The findings provide real research evidence on online social technology use amongst university students. The chapter has educational and theoretical significance and shapes future directions for research on this issue. A compendium of terms, definitions, and explanations of concepts is clearly explained.

Informational Text and the Common Core

Currently, teachers of reading and language arts are being asked to look closely at what materials are being used in their classrooms. As of today, 45 states have become proponents of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These standards have been created to “ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive” (NGA, et al., 2008, p. 24). These standards mandate a higher percentage of what has come to be termed informational text. The first question that needs to be answered is what exactly is the definition of informational text and why is it important? The largest change noted in the shift to informational text is the percentage of text required. Informational text covers a very broad spectrum of reading material including biographies and autobiographies: “books about history, social studies, science, and the arts”; “technical texts, including directions, forms, and information displayed in graphs, charts, or maps”; and “digital sources on a range of topics” (Maloch & Bomer, 2013, p. 209). In the upper grades, the different subject areas are generally taught by a variety of teachers. These content area teachers are experts in their fields and much of their information is strictly informational in nature to begin with. The problem is that “Most teachers are not taught how to teach reading” (Gewertz, 2012, p. 1). This leads to the question of how teachers are utilizing informational texts in their classrooms. This chapter explores informational texts and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Layering Learning – Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

There are several issues that we urgently need to address regarding K-20 education, including engaging students in the learning process, preparing our youth for entry into the 21st century workplace, enabling them to become fully productive citizens, and providing them with the tools they will need to succeed. Our ability to flourish as a nation depends on this. In his article, “Place-Based Knowledge in the Digital Age,” Thomas Fisher (2012) discusses the potential impact Geographic Information Systems (GIS) may have as our global society becomes more immersed in digital and spatial media. He suggests that “GIS will eventually become a major way—perhaps the dominant way—in which we will access information in the future because of the essentially spatial nature of that software” (Fisher, 2012, p. 5). While Fisher's notion of “spatializing education” may seem abstract, the reality is our ability to connect multiple layers of data based on place will afford a more informed insight into our past, present, and future by revealing relationships, trends, and patterns. Connecting data spatially shifts our way of thinking, and our way of doing business as well as education (Baker, 2012). This is explored in this chapter.

Enhancing Health Education with Collaborative Narratives

This chapter explains the lessons learned when an English professor and a physical therapist decided to work together. Patients in a clinic and students in a classroom share the need for positive role models to teach them effective strategies to enhance their learning. The official research journey focuses on the connections among writing, positive outlook, and healing. The unofficial journey focuses on the lessons learned from the authors teaching each other about their fields of expertise. They encourage readers to accomplish two tasks. First, think about how to get out of your personal comfort zone and change your outlook about the amount of stress in your life. Second, think about how to get out of your professional comfort zone and change your outlook about working with colleagues in other disciplines. By sharing their experiences, the authors provide ideas on how to participate in interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues in school and community.

Cyclonic Transactions as Cultural Ecological Mechanisms for Investigating Change and Facilitating Action Research in Education

The aim of this chapter is to draw together two theoretical perspectives on the dynamics of educational change and propose a contemporary integrated framework as an analytical tool for use in education. A cultural ecological framework, which views the individual as an integral part of the environment and places significance on interaction with the environment in the context of daily work, is integrated with a cyclonic transactional framework, which emerges from recent research on online education and traverses hermeneutical, transformational mechanisms. The cyclonic transactional framework forms a bridge between abstraction and lived experience, which are both at the heart of the cultural ecological framework, and provides a mechanism through which learning relationships may be explored. The augmented and integrated framework, developed from historical and current explorations, is a tool that can assist policy development, implementation, and evaluation for both classroom and online education.

Library Science and Technology in a Changing World

As the world changes, so does information and its use. This chapter explains functions of library science as impacted by technology within the context of change. Library science provides the basis for mediation between the community and the information it needs to carry out its functions, tempered by the impact of technologies. Librarians apply library science principles as they develop and manage the community's information collection. In today's digital environment, the proliferation of information requires that librarians increasingly need to interpret, filter, and evaluate that information. Librarians apply library science-based technical processes to organize and optimize the efficient retrieval of the needed information. In addition, librarians foster information literacy in communities, largely serving as a responsive guide for all of its community members, not only for the purpose of pre-existing library comprising their catalogs and indexes, but the creation of new orders developed and made possible by the computer search capabilities. In these ways, library science is dynamic and facilitates change.

Using Technologies to Integrate Vocational Learning in Multiple Contexts

Due to various influences and developments, learning nowadays must be conceived as a lifelong process that occurs within and among different formal, non-formal, and informal contexts. However, learning poses new requirements for individuals as it urges them to cope with diverse and dynamically changing perspectives, articulate these diversities, and reconcile them into a meaningful whole. In this chapter, the authors present theoretical and empirical evidence that accounts for the potential of technologies as facilitators for connecting and integrating learning across different contexts. Given the authors' specific expertise, they particularly focus on learning in vocational and professional settings.

Authentic Education

Active learning challenges students to take ownership of their learning engagements by engaging actively in developing skills, which includes literary skills, linking the practice to theory, as well as thinking about practical and theoretical implications. Textual analysis of their learning journals revealed that students who chose “authentic education” over “instructionism” understood the technical issues of the knowledge better. They were also more creative and committed. Their learning process conveys that they are empowered in understanding the connections between the practical and theoretical dimensions and that they are open to deal with uncertainty. The findings indicate that the construction of learning by self-directed and empowered students can be formed by a community of these students. This is explored in this chapter.