Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

在线练习套件：供职前教师学习如何促进数学和科学论证讨论的练习空间、模拟和虚拟现实环境

• 批准号: 2037983
• 负责人: Jamie Mikeska
• 金额: $ 319.79万
• 依托单位: Educational Testing Service
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-08-15 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2037983&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Online; Practice; Suite; Spaces; Simulations

In teacher education it is widely acknowledged that learning to teach requires that preservice teachers have robust, authentic, and consistent opportunities to engage in the work of teaching--ideally across different contexts, with diverse student populations, and for varied purposes--as they hone their instructional practice. Practice teaching experiences in K-12 classrooms, such as field placements and student teaching, are the most widely used approaches to provide these opportunities. In an ideal world these experiences are opportunities for preservice teachers to observe and work closely with mentor teachers and try out new instructional strategies with individual, small groups, and whole classes of K-12 students. While these experiences are critical to supporting preservice teachers’ learning, it can be difficult to help preservice teachers transition from university classrooms to field placements in ways that provide them with opportunities to enact ambitious instructional strategies. This need is particularly acute in mathematics and science education, where classrooms that model strong disciplinary discourse and argumentation are not always prevalent. This challenge is amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic environment; with schools and universities across the nation operating online, many preservice teachers will miss out on opportunities to practice teaching both within their courses and in K-12 classrooms. To address this urgent challenge in STEM education, project researchers will develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary activities that teacher education programs can use in both online and face-to-face settings to provide practice-based opportunities for preservice teachers to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science, a critical teaching practice in these content areas. The practice-based activities include: (1) interactive, online digital games that create targeted practice spaces to engage preservice teachers to respond to students’ content-focused ideas and interactions; (2) facilitating group discussions with upper elementary or middle school student avatars in a simulated classroom using performance-based tasks; and (3) an immersive virtual reality whole-classroom environment that allows for verbal, textual and non-verbal interactions between a teacher avatar and 24 student avatars. The online practice suite, made up of these activities along with supports to help teacher educators use them effectively, represents not just an immediate remedy to the challenge of COVID-19, but a rich and flexible set of resources with the potential to support and improve teacher preparation well beyond the COVID-19 challenge.This study will use design-based research to create this integrated system of practice teaching opportunities. This approach will involve developing and refining the individual practice activities, the integrated online practice suite, and the teacher educator support materials by working with a teacher educator community of practice and engaging up to 20 teacher educators and 400 preservice teachers in multiple rounds of tryouts and piloting during the three-year project. The project will proceed in three phases: a first phase of small-scale testing, a second phase trying the materials with teacher educators affiliated with the project team, and a third phase piloting materials with a broader group of mathematics and science teacher educators. Data sources include surveys of preservice teachers’ background characteristics, perceptions of the practice activities, beliefs about content instruction, perceptions about preparedness to teach, and understanding of argumentation and discussion, videos and/or log files of their performances for each practice teaching activity, and scores on their practice teaching performances. The project team will also observe the in-class instructional activities prior to and after the use of each practice teaching activity, conduct interviews with teacher educators, and collect instructional logs from the teacher educators and instructional artifacts used to support preservice teachers’ learning. Data analysis will include pre and post comparisons to examine evidence of growth in preservice math and science teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, understanding, and teaching performance. The project team will also build a series of analytic memos to describe how each teacher educator used the online practice suite within the mathematics or science methods course and the factors and decisions that went into that each use case. Then, they will describe and understand how the various uses and adaptations may be linked to contextual factors within these diverse settings. Findings will be used to produce empirically and theoretically grounded design principles and heuristics for these types of practice-based activities to support teacher learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在教师教育中，人们普遍承认，学习教学要求职前教师拥有强大，真实和稳定的机会来从事教学工作 - 在不同的情况下，在不同的情况下，具有多样化的学生人数，并且出于各种目的，他们只是他们的教学实践。在K-12教室（例如现场安排和学生教学）中的练习教学经验是提供这些机会的最广泛使用的方法。在理想的世界中，这些经历是职前教师可以与心理老师密切合作的机会，并与个人，小组和整个K-12学生一起尝试新的教学策略。尽管这些经验对于支持职前教师的学习至关重要，但很难帮助职前教师从大学教室过渡到现场安置，从而为他们提供了制定雄心勃勃的教学策略的机会。在数学和科学教育中，这种需求尤其急剧，在这些教室中，模拟强烈的纪律话语和论证的教室并不总是普遍。联盟19日大流行环境扩大了这一挑战。随着全国各地的学校在线运作，许多职前教师将错过在课程和K-12教室中练习教学的机会。为了应对STEM教育中的这一紧急挑战，项目研究人员将开发，进行试验并完善一系列协调和互补的活动，教师教育计划可以在在线和面对面的环境中使用这些活动，以提供基于实践的机会，以使职前教师能够促进其促进论证的能力，以促进论证专注于数学和科学领域，这是这些内容领域的重要教学实践。基于实践的活动包括：（1）互动的在线数字游戏，创建有针对性的实践空间，以吸引职前教师以应对学生的内容和互动； （2）使用基于绩效的任务在模拟教室中与上级或中学生化身进行支持的小组讨论； （3）一个身临其境的虚拟现实整个教室环境，可以在老师化身和24个学生化身之间进行口头，文字和非语言互动。由这些活动组成的在线实践套件以及帮助教师教育者有效地使用它们的支持，不仅代表了Covid-19的挑战的立即补救措施，而且是一套丰富而灵活的资源，具有潜力，可以支持和改善Covid-19挑战以外的教师准备。这项研究将使用基于设计的研究来创造这种基于设计的研究来创造这项集成的实践教学机会系统。这种方法将涉及开发和完善各个实践活动，综合的在线实践套件以及教师教育者的支持材料，通过与教师教育者的实践社区合作，并在三年的项目中与多达20名教师教育者和400名职前教师一起参与。该项目将分为三个阶段：小规模测试的第一阶段，第二阶段与项目团队的教师教育工作者的材料一起尝试材料，以及与更广泛的数学和科学教师教育者一起进行的第三阶段试验材料。数据源包括对职前教师的背景特征的调查，对实践活动的看法，相信内容说明，对教学准备的看法以及对论证和讨论的理解，对每种实践教学活动的表现的视频和/或日志文件，以及对他们的实践教学表现进行评分。项目团队还将在使用每项实践教学活动之前和之后观察课堂教学活动，与教师教育者进行访谈，并从教师教育者那里收集教学日志，以及用于支持职前教师学习的教学文物。数据分析将包括前后的比较，以检查学前数学和科学教师的信念，看法，理解和教学表现的增长证据。项目团队还将建立一系列分析备忘录，以描述每个教师教育者如何在数学或科学方法课程中使用在线实践套件以及每个用例中所带来的因素和决策。然后，他们将描述并理解如何将各种用途和适应与这些潜水员设置中的上下文因素联系起来。调查结果将用于为这些类型的基于教师学习的活动而紧急和理论上扎根的设计原则和启发式方法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过评估该基金会的知识分子和更广泛的影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并被认为是宝贵的支持。