Exploring the relationships between learners’ social and cognitive presence patterns and peer support in digital social reading

This study explored how undergraduate students demonstrated cognitive and social presence in their written comments during asynchronous social annotation activities. Moreover, we investigated the relationships between cognitive and social presence and peer support in digital social reading. This study included 93 participants from a large North American University, who were asked to annoate weekly readings throughout a semester using a digital social reading platform. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text mining tool to analyze learners’ written comments, we identified the linguistic indicators of social presence and cognitive presence, respectively. We then conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA) to examine whether students demonstrated specific patterns of social and cognitive presence. Learners showed two profiles, revealing high and low presence patterns. The high-presence group exhibited greater engagement in the affective and interactive aspects of social presence, as well as in the first two stages of cognitive presence (i.e., triggering event, and exploration), compared to the low-presence group. Furthermore, the high-presence group was more likely to receive peer support than the low-presence group. These findings lead to practical implications for instructors regarding promoting interaction among students in online learning communities, especially in social digital learning contexts.