1 Running Head: ARTICLE CRITIQUE
Article Critique Task Stream Assignment
EDF 5481
Florida International University
ARTICLE CRITIQUE 2
Article Critique Task Stream Assignment
Introduction Summary
The article I critiqued is called Interactions Among Online Learners: A Quantitative
Interdisciplinary Study by Pawan Jain, Sachin Jain, and Smita Jain, 2011. The study focuses on
the amount of interaction students have with each other and with their professors to identify if
interaction levels differ among disciplines.
Research Problem
The major research problem identified in the study is that there is not enough research
concerning the matter of online interaction. The majority of the completed research is very
discipline specific and cannot be generalized. The authors justification for conducting the study
was to remedy the lack of prior research on this increasingly important topic. The purpose is to
fill the gap and try to understand the relationship between the interaction and differences in
discipline; however, the authors also noted that this was one of the purposes of the study and
failed to mention any other purpose.
While the authors did not specifically discuss their decision to utilize a quantitative
approach in this study, it was clearly justified by their need to examine the relationship between
discipline and study interaction. The theoretical basis that is used as the basis for this study is
that increased interaction within an online course will ultimately lead to a better designed course
and better outcomes for students grades. Further, the authors attest that much of the literature is
inadequate for their study due to the specificity of the studies, disallowing them to be universally
applied.
ARTICLE CRITIQUE 3
The research question is do the differences in the discipline area impact the overall
interaction among learners as defined by the number of learner-learner interactions? The
hypothesis that was tested is there is no significant relationship between the number of learner-
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