In this research paper we attempted to answer how to facilitate a community of inquiry in an online teacher education course, in order to support deep and meaningful student-to-content interactions. This research is a follow-up on the action research conducted on the online teacher education course that was running for the 10 consecutive years (Batarelo, Nevin, & Malian, 2007). The course was designed as an introductory course on exceptional children for special education teacher education program and the elementary teacher education program and carried course credit towards teaching certificate upon graduation. The previous research findings revealed that there is a need for ongoing adjustment of the teaching practices, course content and course assignments with a goal to encourage students; higher-level thinking. According to Lipman (2003), a community of inquiry is the social and educational context that among other effects initiates questioning, reasoning, connecting and developing problem-solving techniques. With intent to document the development of a community of inquiry, we focused on the student participation in the group assignments in several sections of the same online course and evaluated the group assignments’ according to the Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives (Bloom, 1984). The questions reflect the newest understandings of cognitive development, according to a revised taxonomy of learning objectives by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) there is a change from nouns (e.g., the application level) to verbs (e.g., applying). Schultz (2005) notes the change in positioning of the previous evaluation level now described as “evaluating” is the second from the top of the taxonomy while the previous synthesis level, now described as “creating”, is now shown at the top. Online group assignments (by design) required students to proceed from remembering, through understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating (i.e., the higher levels of thinking). The students were asked to discuss educational and behavioral characteristics of a student with special needs, through the scope of different roles (parental role, school administrator role, school counselor role, regular classroom teacher, resource room teacher). In the group assignment, they were to draw on the knowledge and skills that they had demonstrated in previous assignments that focused on remembering and understanding. The way in which the task was designed allowed students to function at higher level of thinking. In other words, it was assumed that majority of students should proceed towards analysis, synthesis and evaluation level of Bloom, in order to successfully complete assigned tasks.

A mixed methods approach was used to analyze the data. The data from group discussions in 8 courses that were taught during regular semesters were retrieved and analyzed on the Bloom's level of thinking. The frequency of occurrence at each of Bloom’s levels were counted. The analyzed group discussions were captured under the Blackboard platform. The communication between course instructor and students was also happening through the means of email, but these email messages were not analyzed. All of the messages posted by members of each of the discussion groups were collated verbatim and categorized/coded into one of Bloom's 6 levels. The total forty-group discussion board threads with average of 20 student postings pre thread were coded using a constant-comparative method and graphed to help answer the research hypothesis. The discussion board thread was the analysis unit, which was later compared to the final reports written by the teams.

The research findings suggest that in the large majority of the discussions, which were happening during a two-week period, in the groups with average of six students, students’ communications did not reach higher levels of thinking, according to Bloom’s taxonomy. Also, it was apparent that the level of thinking that occurred in the analyzed discussions was comparable to the quality of the final reports, which were written by the teams. It should be noted that some of the communication could not be categorized into Bloom’s levels of thinking. Some of the communications could be characterized as 'resourcefulness' as team members reported that they used multiple methods to communicate (e.g., the bulletin board, email to individual team members, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings). Other communications could be described as "technical problem solution generator' for those team members who were having technical problems.