HowStudentsBehaveWhileSolvingCriticalThinkingTasksinanUnconstrainedOnlineEnvironment: InsightsfromProcessMining

Educational studies. 2024. P. 4–26.

Belyaeva A.

To learn successfully with the use of various internet resources, students must acquire critical thinking skills that will enable them to critically search, evaluate, select and verify information online. Defined as Critical Online Reasoning, this complex latent construct manifests itself in an unconstrained online environment and is measured on two levels: students’ work product (the essay) and the process of task completion (online behaviour patterns). This research investigates the possibility of distinguishing between students’ successful and unsuccessful attempts to take the test with the implementation of process mining techniques. The findings of the work were gained on generalised behaviour patterns from the process mining algorithm deployed on the two groups of students (63 low performing and 45 high performing students). Divided by the work product score, the two groups exposed some differences in their online behaviour, with the high performers showing more strategic behaviour and effective search and use of information online. However, the research has also shown the downside of process mining as a tool for generalisation of process patterns. In the conclusion section, the author suggests future areas that could be investigated to approach the task of pattern extraction.

Keywords: critical online reasoning, process mining, event logs, process patterns