Assessing Participation and Academic Performance in Discussion Forums: A Systematic Review

The discussion forum format is usually used to promote interaction in digital technology-mediated distance education proposals. The activities carried out in these forums could help students become cognitively engaged during their learning process. Assessing how they participate in these spaces requires protocols that allow capturing various characteristics of this type of interaction. Some of these protocols are often used to evaluate students’ academic performance. This work offers a systematic review of the literature that addresses these issues in the field of Higher Education. Based on 54 research works carried out between 2015 and 2020, four methodologies are identified (simple statistics, content analysis, social media analysis, and processes analysis) that evaluate different aspects (quantity, quality, temporality, and relationships) of participation. Five of these articles also assess student performance in these interactive spaces. The results are analyzed and discussed with special focus on the possibilities offered by these methodologies to promote constructive learning in collaborative contexts.