Linking shared metacognition to community of inquiry in online graduate courses

As online learning continues to grow, understanding how learners regulate their cognition both individually and collaboratively is critical to designing meaningful online learning experiences. While the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework provides a well-established model for designing quality online courses, its relationship with online learners’ metacognitive development in collaborative settings remains underexplored. This study investigated the relationships between online learners’ shared metacognition—including self-regulation and co-regulation—and their perceived social, teaching, and cognitive presences, as outlined in the CoI framework. Before investigating these relationships, we evaluated the psychometric properties of the partially validated Shared Metacognition Questionnaire (Garrison and Akyol, The Internet and Higher Education 24:66–71, 2015) and provided additional validity and reliability evidence. The study included 348 graduate students enrolled in 25 fully online courses in the United States. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The findings revealed that (1) the SMQ is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing learners’ metacognition in online collaborative settings, (2) shared metacognition significantly correlates with social, teaching, and cognitive presences, (3) cognitive presence demonstrates the strongest correlation with shared metacognition, followed by social and teaching presences, and (4) compared to self-regulation, co-regulation is more influential across social, teaching, and cognitive presences. These findings contribute to the measurement of online learners’ metacognition, advance the understanding of the CoI framework by linking it to metacognitive processes, and offer practical implications for designing collaborative online learning environments that foster metacognitive development.