O n f e r e n c e

CCT levels 
Questioning 
Analysing 
Synthesising Evaluating Decision 
making 
 
 
Interactive 
message 
type 
Dialog 
Developing 
dialectic 
Dialectic 
Construction 
Exploratory talk 
Cumulative 
talk 
Developing 
exploratory 
talk 
Challenge and 
explain 
Table 2
In IAM, 
questioning
is raising questions, asking for clarifications, and collaboratively 
identifying possible factors relevant to the problem. 
Analysing
is identifying and 
negotiating areas of disagreement among online members, and advancing arguments. 
Synthesising
is bringing together a range of relevant ideas presented on ADF. 
Evaluating
is asking oneself and others whether the solution would work, and whether it has utility 
in certain contexts. 
Decision making
is when the new statement or solution is 
consensually arrived at and is applied to a given task or a real-world context. However, I 
applied a number of modifications to IAM to adapt it to the aim of this study, two of 
which are discussed next. 
Firstly, to simplify referencing during the inter-rater reliability process and the reporting 
of findings, I labeled each CCT level in the modified IAM, which corresponded to the 
descriptions offered in IAM for the different CCT levels. The labels for Level 1 to Level 5 
respectively were 
questioning
, 
analysing
, 
synthesising
, 
evaluating
, and 
decision making
. 

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-153- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Secondly, since in my study I aimed to examine the demonstration of CCT rather than 
merely the interactions on the ADFs, I modified those indicators in IAM which coded for 
collaboration but did not code for critical thinking. These indicators were modified by 
adding keywords from relevant indicators present in other coding schemes such as PIM. 
The modified indicators are as follows and the added keywords appear in italics. 
‘
Relevant
statement of observation or opinion’ and ‘
substantiated
statement of 
agreement from 
one or more participants’ in the questioning level, as well as ‘identifying 
and stating areas of disagreement 
with support
’ in the analysing level. My proposed 
synthetic coding scheme, mainly adapted from IAM (Gunawardena, et. al., 1997), is 
presented in Table 3. 
Modified Interaction Analysis Model (IAM)