Cognitive Presence

In the previous lesson on 'Establishing a Social Presence', we focused on creating a learning community through the development of a social presence. To ensure deep and meaningful learning, it is also crucial to establish a cognitive or 'thinking' presence. Garrison, Anderson & Archer (2001) define cognitive presence 'as the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry'.

Active and engaging learning activities are required for the course to be effective. The primary focus of cognitive presence is to develop a higher-order thinking process (i.e. critical thinking or practical inquiry) that integrates existing learning with new learning through reflection, discussion, and feedback.

In order to establish this thinking presence, it is important to design academic activities at the beginning of an online course that has a significant impact on how students approach learning. These activities should focus on inquiry and the 'three Rs' of student engagement (Littky, 2004):

Relevance– provoking student curiosity and establishing connections to prior learning or knowledge

Rigour– challenging students to solve problems that are personally meaningful to them

Relationships– designing a learning environment where students work collaboratively together in a community of inquiry.

How Do We Design for Cognitive Engagement?

The guiding principles in designing for cognitive engagement (hence, cognitive presence) are shown in the diagram below. Refer to Task 1 to Task 13 (on the left menu). Most of these tasks can be adopted and adapted for learning activities that would engage students cognitively.

Below is a selection of references to help you designing learning activities that promote cognitive presence:

A Guide for Identifying and Eliciting Cognitive Presence—good resource on designing cognitive presence in an online course.
Critical thinking in the Online Classroom - This article gives some insight on the aspect of cognitive presence in the Community of Inquiry framework.
Community of Inquiry: Cognitive Presence — There’s also a free ebook on this website: “What Your Adult Students Want: A Collection of First-Person Narratives”.
Cognitive presence in asynchronous online learning: a comparison of four discussion strategies—This research paper compares the impact of four scenario-based online discussion strategies – structured, scaffolded, debate and role play – to the learners’ cognitive presence, the outcome of the discussion.
Cognitive Presence Papers—This web page provides a listing of research papers that focused primarily on the cognitive presence aspect of the Community of Inquiry.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse