Social cues in asynchronous online discussions: Effects of social metacognition and new ideas

This study examines how group members’ social metacognition and new ideas in recent messages affected a current message’s positive social cue (SC) or negative SC during asynchronous, online discussions. We modeled 894 messages by 183 participants regarding 60 high school mathematics topics (typically 8 people posted per topic) on a public, informal, mathematics problem solving website not connected to any class or school (www.artofproblemsolving.com) with a statistical discourse analysis. Results showed that group members’ agreements facilitated positive SCs, while disagreements facilitated negative SCs. Meanwhile, new ideas and justifications were less likely to be accompanied by SCs. Together, these results suggest that teachers can foster student’s construction of knowledge by encouraging polite disagreements during online collaborative learning.