Person:

Dede, Christopher

This study investigated novel pedagogies for helping teachers infuse inquiry into a standards-based science curriculum. Using a Multi-User Virtual Environment(MUVE) as a pedagogical vehicle, teams of middle school students collaboratively solved problems around disease in a virtual town called River City. Students interacted with “avatars” of other students, digital artifacts, and computer-based “agents” acting as mentors and colleagues in a virtual community of practice set during the time period when bacteria was just being discovered. This paper describes the results from three implementations of the River City virtual environment in 2004 with approximately 2000 students from geographical diverse urban areas. Results indicate that students were able to conduct inquiry in virtual worlds and were motivated by that process. However, results from assessments vary depending on assessment strategy employed.

Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes (2009) argue that Web 2.0 media are well suited to enhancing the education research community’s purpose of generating and sharing knowledge. My response first articulates how a research infrastructure with capabilities for communal bookmarking, photo/video sharing, social networking, wikis, and mashups could enhance both the pace and quality of education scholarship, complementing federal investments in cyberinfrastructure. Then, I argue for a second, more provocative and controversial usage of this research infrastructure: an experimental attempt to generate “wisdom.” An interconnected suite of Web 2.0 tools customized for research would provide three capabilities important for wise advice: (a) a virtual setting in which stakeholders of many different types could dialogue (b) about rich artifacts grounded in practice and policy (c) with a set of social supports to encourage community norms that respect not only theoretical rigor and empirical evidence, but also interpersonal, experiential, and moral/ethical understandings.

Background, context, and purpose of study: During the middle school years, students frequently show significant declines in motivation toward school in general and mathematics in particular. One way in which researchers have sought to spark students’ interests and build their sense of competence in mathematics and in STEM more generally is through the use of technology. Yet evidence regarding the motivational effectiveness of this approach is mixed. Here we evaluate the impact of three brief technology-based activities on students’ short-term motivation in math. 16,789 5th to 8th grade students and their teachers in one large school district were randomly assigned to three different technology-based activities, each representing a different framework for motivation and engagement and all designed around an exemplary lesson related to algebraic reasoning. We investigated the relationship between specific technology-based activities that embody various motivational constructs and students’ engagement in mathematics and perceived competence in pursuing STEM careers.

The process of social perspective taking holds tremendous promise as a means to facilitate conflict resolution. Despite rapidly accumulating knowledge about social perspective taking in general, scholars know little about how the type of social perspective taking affects outcomes of interest. This study tests whether different ways to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” cause different outcomes. By taking advantage of a computer-based simulation (where participants can learn about others by virtually walking around in the shoes of other characters), we assigned participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 842) to five different perspective taking treatments or a control condition. Results show that perspective takers who receive information about the other party foster more positive relationships and make greater concessions than participants who did not receive information about the other party. Furthermore, those who experientially learned about the other party’s perspective felt more positive about their relationships and made greater concessions during the negotiation than those who were simply provided information about the other party’s perspective. No differences were found between virtually and imaginatively taking the perspective of others. These findings suggest the importance of accounting for the type of social perspective taking in studying how this social-cognitive process may facilitate conflict resolution.

Young people now must compete in a global, knowledge-based, innovation-centered economy; they must acquire not just academic knowledge, but also character attributes such as intrinsic motivation, persistence, and flexibility. To accomplish these ambitious goals, the US National Research Council (2012) recommends the use of “deeper learning” classroom strategies. These include case-based learning, multiple representations of knowledge, collaborative learning, apprenticeships, life-wide learning, learning for transfer, interdisciplinary studies, personalized learning, connected learning, and diagnostic assessments. Immersive media (virtual reality, multi-user virtual environments, mixed and augmented realities) have affordances that enhance this type of learning. EcoXPT is an inquiry-based middle school curriculum on ecosystem science that invites students into immersive experimentation with scaffolding tools that support deeper learning. This includes a case-based approach situated in an unfolding eutrophication scenario in which students learn new information from their observations over space and time, speaking with virtual characters in the world, and gathering information in the field guide and other sources. Diagnostic assessments of students’ progress are based on multiple sources, including process data from various types of logfiles. Multiple varied forms of representation convey perceptual, graphical, and experimental data, enabling students to investigate relationships between variables. Students are apprenticed in the ways of knowing of ecosystems scientists, which involves interdisciplinary knowledge. Students collaborate in teams of two, subdividing the tasks of gathering evidence.

Using latent growth models, we explored: (a) The effect of middle school students' (n = 189) pre-intervention science self-efficacy and science interest on their initial interest in an Ecosystems Multi-User Virtual Environment (EcoMUVE) and the rate of change in their interest in EcoMUVE; and (b) the mediating effect of students' initial interest in EcoMUVE and rate of change in interest on students' post-intervention science self-efficacy and interest in science. Results showed that: (1) students' pre-intervention self-efficacy for science had an effect both on students' triggered situational interest for EcoMUVE and on students' maintained situational interest for EcoMUVE; (2) both triggering and maintaining situational interest in EcoMUVE were important in developing students' science self-efficacy. In fact, maintained situational interest was the stronger predictor; and (3) maintained situational interest for EcoMUVE translated into individual interest for the science content. Results support and extend social cognitive theory as well as models of interest development.

Expert reasoning about ecosystems requires a focus on the dynamics of the system, including the inherent processes, change over time, and responses to disturbances. However, students often bring assumptions to thinking about ecosystems that may limit their developing expertise. Cognitive science research has shown that novices often reduce ongoing patterns and processes to events across diverse science concepts. A robust, event-based focus may exacerbate student difficulties with reasoning about ecosystems in terms of resilience and change over time. In this study, we investigated middle-school students’ initial reasoning about ecosystem dynamics and analyzed promising shifts in their reasoning after they interacted with a virtual environment with features designed to support thinking about change over time. Some students adopted a domino narrative pattern—a sequential story about the events and processes. The findings suggest that educators should consider the possibility that novices will bring event-based framing to their ecosystems learning.