Construction and Validation of a Cognitive Presence Scale for Measuring Online Learners' Engagement

Cognitive presence, a sense of "being there" cognitively, has recently been considered as an important indicator for students' engagement in e-learning. There is, however, no widely accepted scale to measure the level of cognitive presence since most studies have put their effort to set and clarify the conceptual framework with qualitative methodology. This study reviewed existing theories on cognitive presence and related fields extensively and developed a new self-report scale for measuring the conceived level of cognitive presence. The reliability and validity of the scale was tested against 723 undergraduate students in two consecutive studies, 418 in the preliminary and 305 in the follow-up study. Three major constructs to measure the perceived level of cognitive presence were: 1) clear understanding, 2) knowledge construction, and 3) learning management. This paper reports the final results of the two independent studies.