This is a decent review article on cognitive presence so far as it goes, though it does suffer a bit from what I'll call a characteristic 'looseness' common to studies in our field. As the authors write, mist empirical studies of cognitive presence employ a survey (aka the 'instrument') created in 2007 by Swan, et.al. Like similar surveys, it questions students about their attitudes and experiences in the course, where their responses are intended to reflect the degree of cognitive presence in the course. So now, fifteen years later, we look at a series of studies using the survey and aggregate the results. However, in some cases the survey was modified. In other cases, the survey wasn't used at all (only 15 of the 24 papers reviewed used it). That's what I meant by 'looseness'. If you're going to do an empirical enquiry, then your instrumentation needs to be consistent. Now to be fair, the study asks "how has cognitive presence been examined in online courses?" So counting the number of papers that used the COI survey, as compared to those that didn't, is reasonable. But any other questions should be asked strictly within the context of the survey (and not generic, like 'did they use discussion forums').
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