Análise automática da presença cognitiva em discussões online escritas em português

Abstract

This M.Sc. dissertation presents a method that allows the automated analysis of the messages exchanged in online distance-learning forums written in Brazilian Portuguese. In particular, it analyzes the problem of coding discussion transcripts for levels of cognitive presence, an important construct in a widely Community of Inquiry model used in online learning. Although there are coding techniques for cognitive presence in the English language, the literature is still poor in methods for other languages, such as Portuguese. The method proposed here makes use of a set of 127 features extracted from different resources, available for textual analysis through Text Mining techniques, to create a random forest classifier to automatically extract the cognitive phases. The model developed reached 76% accuracy and Cohen’s k of .55, which represents a moderate agreement, and is above the level of pure chance. This paper also provides an analysis of the nature of cognitive presence, observing the classification characteristics that were most relevant to distinguish between the different phases of cognitive presence and a comparative study regarding the main characteristics identified in the phases of presence in different contexts.