Online activity, motivation, and reasoning among adult learners

College students’ motivational beliefs influence their online behavior and ability to think critically. In the present study, doctoral health science students’ reports of motivation, as measured by the California Measure of Mental Motivation, reasoning skill, as measured by the Health Science Reasoning Test, and Web-CT records of online activity during a Web-CT-based statistics course were explored. Critical thinking skill and disposition each contributed unique variance to student grades, with age, organization disposition, and analysis skill as the strongest predictors. The youngest students, those so-called millennial age, and born after 1982, were those with the lowest critical thinking skill and dispositions, and the lowest grades in the class. Future research must take into consideration discrepancies between skill and disposition and interactions with age or cohort. At present, and contrary to popular wisdom, older students may make better online learners than younger.