Student engagement is critical to student learning, especially in the online environment, where students can often feel isolated and disconnected. Therefore, teachers and researchers need to be able to measure student engagement. This study provides validation of the Online Student Engagement scale (OSE) by correlating student self-reports of engagement (via the OSE) with tracking data of student behaviors from an online course management system. It hypothesized that reported student engagement on the OSE would be significantly correlated with two types of student behaviors: observational learning behaviors (i.e., reading e-mails, reading discussion posts, viewing content lectures and documents) and application learning behaviors (posting to forums, writing e-mails, taking quizzes). The OSE was significantly and positively correlated with application learning behaviors. Results are discussed along with potential uses of the OSE by researchers and online instructors.

This essay works toward two goals: 1) to provide an explanation of how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning may work within all four of Boyer’s “scholarships” of discovery, integration, application, and teaching and 2) to clarify the distinctions between quality teaching and scholarship of teaching and learning research. To do that, we posit four quadrants of teaching practices based on two continuum: public/private and systematic/unsystematic. The four quadrants: teaching practice, shared teaching, scholarly teaching and, finally, scholarship of teaching and learning, provide academics with a conceptual model to distinguish various approaches to the teaching process from research into that process.

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Teaching online courses is unexplored territory for many instructors. Understanding how to use the powerful learning techniques involved in cooperative group learning in an online context is imperative. This paper is a first attempt to explore the dynamics of learning groups in the context of online discussion forums. Given the spread of online learning, the importance of this kind of research cannot be overstated. The authors analyzed the content of twenty asynchronous discussion forums within an online course in family communication. Their findings indicate that such groups send social messages at a fairly high rate; that participation seems to be fairly evenly distributed among members, although having a “leader” is helpful to the group’s process; and that instructor messages and competitive student messages have no apparent effect on the final product. However, they also found that two types of messages— orienting/giving information and showing solidarity—were found more frequently in groups that produced higher quality work. This research opens many questions and offers some guidelines about the most effective ways to structure online learning situations.

This paper explains the reasons for and process of creating and testing for reliability and constructing the validity of the Parent-Child Relationship Schema Scale (PCRSS). The instrument is based on the Model of Relationships Survey (MRS). However, where the MRS is an open-ended survey which takes 20-30 minutes to complete and longer to analyze, the PCRSS is a Likert scale survey which can be completed in less than half the time and offers more sophisticated analysis possibilities as well as new research opportunities. The paper explains the three-stage process used to create the PCRSS and the five tests of reliability and concurrent validity that it "passed". We also discuss the potential for new areas of research about the parent-child relationship with the PCRSS.