Developing higher order thinking skills in students is an important task for higher education. Students who are competent analyzers, synthesizers, and eval¬uators become workers who are better prepared for the work challenges they will face. Class discussion, a long-standing and well-regarded instructional method, in online classes is either synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous discussion is in real-time, often using chat or messaging applications. Asynchronous discussion typically uses online discussion boards where students respond to comments and questions from class-mem¬bers. The intention of this study was to explore what higher order thinking skills develop naturally via student social constructivism. This exploratory study measured instances of higher order thinking skills in synchronous and asynchronous online discussion using the Florida Taxonomy of Cognitive Behavior. In this study, overall synchronous discussion was found to be at the knowl¬edge level and overall asynchronous discussion was at the comprehension level. An experiment was conducted comparing overall cognitive levels of synchronous and asynchronous online discussion and a statistically sig¬nificant difference in the overall cognitive level of com¬ments between the two groups was found.