9 Jul, 2010 with 0 comments so far
Our partners at the Massachusetts Audubon Society are including Urban Science as part of their Conservation Leadership Program August 16-20 for youths entering grades 9-12. To learn more about the free program and to sign up, click here.
7 May, 2010 with 1 comment so far
Epistemic games, by design, are very difficult. The concepts, the terminology, decisions, the challenges are usually completely foreign to our young players. We can ask young people to do work that would likely be impossible for most of them to do by themselves precisely because the games provide careful scaffolding. A primary source of that scaffolding are in-game mentors who interact with the players via chat as they play.
Working as a mentor in an epistemic game is also very difficult.
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6 Apr, 2010 with 0 comments so far
In this project, we lay the ground work for developing a potentially transformational approach to STEM assessment in the 21st century.
Today, work that requires only basic skills flows overseas where labor is cheaper, and complex and meaningful STEM thinking means linking skills and knowledge in the context of real-world problems and situations. Problem solving in real STEM practices is characterized by knowledge and skills, to be sure, but also by the way those skills are connected to each other, and to the values and ways of making decisions in STEM fields.
We propose, then, the development of a new method of STEM assessment—called epistemic network analysis (ENA) that focuses not on whether students master specific scientific facts, math skills, or engineering concepts, but on whether and how students link the skills, knowledge, identity, values, and epistemology of a STEM practice into a coherent way of thinking about complex STEM problems.
We describe ENA as “potentially transformational” because it is in its early stages, and involves a radically different and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of STEM assessment. In this proposal we link prior work on an innovative theory of STEM thinking with the mathematical and conceptual tools of social network analysis to create a new conceptual and statistical approach to the measurement of STEM thinking and STEM learning.
We have been developing ENA as an assessment tool in the context of a particular theory of learning (the epistemic frame hypothesis) that applies to a specific kind of STEM learning computer game (epistemic games). However, we want to emphasize ENA is an approach to assessment that could be used in any situation of complex STEM thinking where the connections between things being learned are more important than isolated pieces themselves.
Intellectual Merit
In this proposal, we link work across several domains—including learning theory, psychometrics, and sociology—to develop a new assessment technique designed to measure the impact of technology-based STEM learning environments. This emerging research is, by its nature, uncertain. However, the collective work of the project team—including joint work on the pilot phases of this project—suggests that this research will produce conceptual, theoretical, and methodological results with the potential for far-reaching and long-term impacts on the theory and practice of network analysis, visualization, and their applications to STEM learning.
Broader Impact
The development of the cognitive model proposed here will help educators in a wide variety of fields analyze and improve STEM education by providing a means to dynamically assess the development of complex STEM thinking. The tools we develop will contribute to the field of network analysis, and our development process will enhance the skills and career trajectories of at least five young investigators.
6 Apr, 2010 with 0 comments so far
Goal. This Full Research and Development Project will address the STEM Challenge: “How can all students be assured the opportunity to learn significant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content?” This project will develop a system for producing automated professional mentoring, as a critical piece of technological infrastructure for a new, more motivating, and more inclusive approach to STEM education a decade or more in the future, where students are motivated to learn STEM concepts because they play computer games based on STEM professions.
Technology. The project will add two important components to prior work on NSF-funded STEM computer games. We will develop automated mentoring technology, AutoMentor, building on previous research on automated tutoring systems (specifically on AutoTutor, a computer tutor that helps students learn about science and technology topics by holding a conversation in natural language with the learner) and Evidence Centered Assessment Design (specifically, Epistemic Network Analysis, a methodology developed with NSF funding to assess students’ ability to think and act like STEM professionals through
game play).
Hypothesis. In so doing, the project explores a specific hypothesis about STEM mentoring: A sociocultural model as the basis of an automated tutoring system can provide a computational model of participation in a community of practice, which will produce effective professional feedback from nonplayer-characters in a STEM learning game.
Method. The project will use a Wizard of Oz methodology, in which data will be collected about player/mentor interactions over multiple instances of game play, and the resulting database used to develop and validate a system for automatically coding interactions. The coded database will then be used to generate automated responses to player actions in the game, and the resulting system will be tested to see whether players’ STEM learning with automated mentoring are comparable to outcomes with live mentors.
Team. The project team includes leading researchers in intelligent tutoring systems (Graesser),
assessment (Mislevy), and game-based learning (Shaffer). The team also includes a computer scientist (Gleicher), STEM content expert (Asligul Gocmen, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning,
University of Wisconsin-Madison), measurement expert (Andre A. Rupp, Assistant Professor of Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation, University of Maryland) and a collaborating institution with expertise in STEM educational programming (Massachusetts Audubon Society). The combination of these areas of expertise is, we believe, unique and novel, and has the potential to transform work in each of the core areas of the proposal: intelligent tutoring, assessment, and game-based learning.
Intellectual Merit
The development of AutoMentor will represent a significant contribution to our knowledge about game-based learning and the science of learning more generally. The development of a computational
model of participation in a community of practice will provide an important link between traditional cognitive science and situated views of learning. It will also potentially contribute to research in artificial intelligence and intelligent agents.
Broader impact
This work will provide a powerful technology for incorporating professional STEM expertise in STEM education activities. The project enhances the infrastructure for joint research by forming a collaborative partnership among three research institutions (the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Maryland, and the University of Memphis) and an educational delivery organization (The
Massachusetts Audubon Society). Results will be disseminated through scientific papers and conferences, but also through the work of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. The game incorporating AutoMentor will be available for use by schools and non-profit organizations.
3 Mar, 2010 with 0 comments so far
A few days ago I was meeting with a teacher who ran Urban Science in her classroom last year. We were sitting in her classroom after school, and talking about plans for her to run another version of the game this spring. We were excited because many of the same students from last year are in her class again and we thought it would be interesting to see how they played the game for the second time. Also, the site that the students would be researching and rezoning in the game was actually the neighborhood where the school is located and where most of the students live.
While we were talking, one of her students walked into the room. The teacher enthusiastically told her that the class would be playing Urban Science again this spring. The student looked at us and wordlessly unzipped her coat to reveal the Epistemic Games t-shirt that all of the players got the previous year.
While I don’t want to go too far in interpreting the synchronicity of this encounter, I couldn’t help but think that 5th graders do not make sartorial choices lightly. It can sometimes be hard to know the inner transformations that happen as kids are learning and growing. But every once in a while, if you are lucky, you can get an unzipped glimpse of what kids take with them.
