Detecting cognitive engagement using word embeddings within an online teacher professional development community

Abstract Research states that effective teacher professional development (PD) engages teachers as active learners and co-creators of content. However, it is yet to be known whether such pedagogy impacts on cognitive engagement. We adopt the ICAP Framework to measure cognitive engagement in a teacher PD Massively Open Online Course (MOOC). We use word embeddings to automate the identification of teachers' community contributions as representing ‘active’ engagement by manipulating course materials, or ‘constructive’ engagement through the generation of new knowledge. We explored individual variation in engagement across units. Our findings demonstrated that the participants' cognitive engagement is influenced by the nature of MOOC tasks. We adopted a manual content analysis approach to explore constructive contributions. From 67 cases considered, all but one case was identified as containing ‘constructive knowledge’, providing a solid basis for replicating our proposed methodology to analyse cognitive engagement within the community-centric MOOC models.