There is growing appreciation across the broader education community that educational three dimen... more There is growing appreciation across the broader education community that educational three dimensional virtual learning environments are part of the daily lives of citizens. This blurring of the boundaries along with better understandings of learning as a personally constructed, life-long process of making meaning and shaping identity, has initiated a growing awareness in the field that the questions and frameworks guiding assessing these environments should be reconsidered in light of these new realities. ...
This article offers insights into how the design of innovations can enhance their “scalability”: ... more This article offers insights into how the design of innovations can enhance their “scalability”: the ability to adapt an innovation to effective usage in a wide variety of contexts, including settings where major conditions for success are absent or attenuated. We are implementing the ...
In this thesis, I conduct an exploratory study to investigate the relationship between students' ... more In this thesis, I conduct an exploratory study to investigate the relationship between students' self-efficacy on entry into authentic scientific activity and the scientific inquiry behaviors they employ while engaged in that process, over time. Scientific inquiry has been a major standard in most science education policy doctrines for the past two decades and is exemplified by activities such as making observations, formulating hypotheses, gathering and analyzing data, and forming conclusions from that data. The self-efficacy literature, however, indicates that self-efficacy levels affect perseverance and engagement. This study investigated the relationship between these two constructs. The study is conducted in a novel setting, using an innovative science curriculum delivered through an interactive computer technology that recorded each student's conversations, movements, and activities while behaving as a practicing scientist in a "virtual world" called River City. River City is a Multi-User Virtual Environment designed to engage students in a collaborative scientific inquiry-based learning experience. As a result, I was able to follow students' moment-by-moment choices of behavior while they were behaving as scientists. I collected data on students' total scientific inquiry behaviors over three visits to River City, as well as the number of sources from which they gathered their scientific data. I analyzed my longitudinal data on the 96 seventh-graders using individual growth modeling. I found that self-efficacy played a role in the number of data-gathering behaviors students engaged in initially, with high self-efficacy students engaging in more data gathering than students with low self-efficacy. However, the impact of student self-efficacy on rate of change in data gathering behavior differed by gender; by the end of the study, student self-efficacy did not impact data gathering. In addition, students' level of self-efficacy did not affect how many different sources from which they chose to gather data. There are indications in my results that novel interventions like a Multi-user Virtual Environment might act as a catalyst for change in student learning. Further research using these techniques may enable a better understanding of the interaction between self-efficacy and scientific inquiry, and eventually science learning outcomes.
... awarded a contract to a university-based research institute to conduct a 3-year evaluation of... more ... awarded a contract to a university-based research institute to conduct a 3-year evaluation of the North Carolina 1:1 Learning ... Twenty-first Century Teacher Education in the Americas: Horizontal Cooperation and the Inter-American Teacher Education Network (ITEN) Society for ...
Educational Technology the Magazine For Managers of Change in Education, 2005
This National Science Foundation funded project is studying graphical multi-user virtual environm... more This National Science Foundation funded project is studying graphical multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) to investigate whether using this interactive medium in classroom settings can simulate real world experimentation and can provide students with engaging, meaningful learning experiences that enhance scientific literacy. In the project's River City curriculum, teams of middle school students are asked to collaboratively solve a digital 19 th century city's problems with illness, through interaction with digital artifacts, tacit clues, and computer-based 'agents' acting as mentors and colleagues in a virtual community of practice. This paper describes the design-based research strategy by which we are currently extending an educational MUVE environment and curriculum. Through several iterations of design-based research, we have refined our curriculum, the MUVE environment, and the theories underlying our design.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences, Jun 22, 2004
This National Science Foundation funded project utilizes graphical multi-user virtual environment... more This National Science Foundation funded project utilizes graphical multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) as a vehicle to study (1) classroom-based situated learning and (2) the ways in which virtual environments may aid the transfer of learning from classroom contexts into real world settings. In the project's River City curriculum, teams of middle school students are asked to collaboratively solve a simulated 19 th century city's problems with illness, through interaction with each others' 'avatars', digital artifacts, tacit clues, and computer-based 'agents' acting as mentors and colleagues in a virtual community of practice. This paper describes the design-based research strategy by which we are currently extending an educational MUVE environment and curriculum developed with prior NSF funding. We are implementing a series of studies to determine if such virtual environments can sufficiently replicate authentic contexts and multi-leveled communities of practice to provide students with classroom experiences in situated learning.
Uma Natarajan, Angela Shelton, Tera Kane, and Catherine Willard Temple University USA umanat@temp... more Uma Natarajan, Angela Shelton, Tera Kane, and Catherine Willard Temple University USA [email protected][email protected] tlkane ... explore students' understanding of inquiry and how they expressed this explicitly, we instituted a teacher facilitated post-module classroom ...
The SAVE Science project is an attempt to address the shortcomings of current assessments of scie... more The SAVE Science project is an attempt to address the shortcomings of current assessments of science. The project has developed two virtual worlds that each have a mystery or natural phenomenon requiring scientific explanation; by recording students' behavior as they investigate the mystery, these worlds can be used to assess their understanding of the scientific method. Currently, however, the scoring of the assessment depends either on manual grading of students' written responses, or, on multiple choice questions. This paper presents an automated grader that can combine with SAVE Science's virtual worlds to provide a cheap mechanism for assessments of the ability to apply scientific methodology. In experiments on over 300 middle school students, our best automated grader improves by over 50% relative to the closest system from previous work in predicting grades supplied by human judges.
There is growing appreciation across the broader education community that educational three dimen... more There is growing appreciation across the broader education community that educational three dimensional virtual learning environments are part of the daily lives of citizens. This blurring of the boundaries along with better understandings of learning as a personally constructed, life-long process of making meaning and shaping identity, has initiated a growing awareness in the field that the questions and frameworks guiding assessing these environments should be reconsidered in light of these new realities. ...
This article offers insights into how the design of innovations can enhance their “scalability”: ... more This article offers insights into how the design of innovations can enhance their “scalability”: the ability to adapt an innovation to effective usage in a wide variety of contexts, including settings where major conditions for success are absent or attenuated. We are implementing the ...
In this thesis, I conduct an exploratory study to investigate the relationship between students' ... more In this thesis, I conduct an exploratory study to investigate the relationship between students' self-efficacy on entry into authentic scientific activity and the scientific inquiry behaviors they employ while engaged in that process, over time. Scientific inquiry has been a major standard in most science education policy doctrines for the past two decades and is exemplified by activities such as making observations, formulating hypotheses, gathering and analyzing data, and forming conclusions from that data. The self-efficacy literature, however, indicates that self-efficacy levels affect perseverance and engagement. This study investigated the relationship between these two constructs. The study is conducted in a novel setting, using an innovative science curriculum delivered through an interactive computer technology that recorded each student's conversations, movements, and activities while behaving as a practicing scientist in a "virtual world" called River City. River City is a Multi-User Virtual Environment designed to engage students in a collaborative scientific inquiry-based learning experience. As a result, I was able to follow students' moment-by-moment choices of behavior while they were behaving as scientists. I collected data on students' total scientific inquiry behaviors over three visits to River City, as well as the number of sources from which they gathered their scientific data. I analyzed my longitudinal data on the 96 seventh-graders using individual growth modeling. I found that self-efficacy played a role in the number of data-gathering behaviors students engaged in initially, with high self-efficacy students engaging in more data gathering than students with low self-efficacy. However, the impact of student self-efficacy on rate of change in data gathering behavior differed by gender; by the end of the study, student self-efficacy did not impact data gathering. In addition, students' level of self-efficacy did not affect how many different sources from which they chose to gather data. There are indications in my results that novel interventions like a Multi-user Virtual Environment might act as a catalyst for change in student learning. Further research using these techniques may enable a better understanding of the interaction between self-efficacy and scientific inquiry, and eventually science learning outcomes.
... awarded a contract to a university-based research institute to conduct a 3-year evaluation of... more ... awarded a contract to a university-based research institute to conduct a 3-year evaluation of the North Carolina 1:1 Learning ... Twenty-first Century Teacher Education in the Americas: Horizontal Cooperation and the Inter-American Teacher Education Network (ITEN) Society for ...
Educational Technology the Magazine For Managers of Change in Education, 2005
This National Science Foundation funded project is studying graphical multi-user virtual environm... more This National Science Foundation funded project is studying graphical multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) to investigate whether using this interactive medium in classroom settings can simulate real world experimentation and can provide students with engaging, meaningful learning experiences that enhance scientific literacy. In the project's River City curriculum, teams of middle school students are asked to collaboratively solve a digital 19 th century city's problems with illness, through interaction with digital artifacts, tacit clues, and computer-based 'agents' acting as mentors and colleagues in a virtual community of practice. This paper describes the design-based research strategy by which we are currently extending an educational MUVE environment and curriculum. Through several iterations of design-based research, we have refined our curriculum, the MUVE environment, and the theories underlying our design.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences, Jun 22, 2004
This National Science Foundation funded project utilizes graphical multi-user virtual environment... more This National Science Foundation funded project utilizes graphical multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) as a vehicle to study (1) classroom-based situated learning and (2) the ways in which virtual environments may aid the transfer of learning from classroom contexts into real world settings. In the project's River City curriculum, teams of middle school students are asked to collaboratively solve a simulated 19 th century city's problems with illness, through interaction with each others' 'avatars', digital artifacts, tacit clues, and computer-based 'agents' acting as mentors and colleagues in a virtual community of practice. This paper describes the design-based research strategy by which we are currently extending an educational MUVE environment and curriculum developed with prior NSF funding. We are implementing a series of studies to determine if such virtual environments can sufficiently replicate authentic contexts and multi-leveled communities of practice to provide students with classroom experiences in situated learning.
Uma Natarajan, Angela Shelton, Tera Kane, and Catherine Willard Temple University USA umanat@temp... more Uma Natarajan, Angela Shelton, Tera Kane, and Catherine Willard Temple University USA [email protected][email protected] tlkane ... explore students' understanding of inquiry and how they expressed this explicitly, we instituted a teacher facilitated post-module classroom ...
The SAVE Science project is an attempt to address the shortcomings of current assessments of scie... more The SAVE Science project is an attempt to address the shortcomings of current assessments of science. The project has developed two virtual worlds that each have a mystery or natural phenomenon requiring scientific explanation; by recording students' behavior as they investigate the mystery, these worlds can be used to assess their understanding of the scientific method. Currently, however, the scoring of the assessment depends either on manual grading of students' written responses, or, on multiple choice questions. This paper presents an automated grader that can combine with SAVE Science's virtual worlds to provide a cheap mechanism for assessments of the ability to apply scientific methodology. In experiments on over 300 middle school students, our best automated grader improves by over 50% relative to the closest system from previous work in predicting grades supplied by human judges.
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Papers by diane ketelhut