Studying Situated Learning and Knowledge Transfer in a Multi-user Virtual Environment

(1)基于课堂的情境学习和（2）虚拟环境可以帮助学习从课堂环境转移到真实的世界设置的方式。情境学习是关于认知和教育的主要理论，其核心是在“实践社区”中的学徒制（在实践的社会文化结构中从新手变成专家）。MUVEs是一个很有前途的媒介，促进和评估基于课堂的情境学习，因为它们可以支持沉浸式，扩展的经验，结合建模和指导的问题类似于那些在真实的世界的背景。该项目将扩展先前由NSF资助开发的教育MUVE;其课程基于解决问题的社区，学生通过与其他具有不同技能水平的参与者共同解释数据来获得知识。本研究将探讨此虚拟环境是否能充分复制真实情境及多层次的实践社群，以提供学生情境学习的课堂经验。此外，学生将学校所学知识应用于真实的世界的能力有限，这是一个长期存在的关键问题，情境学习教学设计的对照研究可以帮助澄清。“迁移”是将在一种情况下学到的知识应用到另一种情况，如果学习任务的指导导致迁移任务的性能提高，则会证明迁移任务，通常是需要专家性能的真实的世界设置。MUVEs提供了一个独特的实验工具，研究情境启示（支持特定活动的相关属性的情况下创建）和限制（不变的转换下，改变学习情况到迁移的情况下）如何影响学生的学习和迁移的能力。情境学习涉及到建筑、社会、组织和物质载体的星座，这些载体塑造了特定的环境。本项目将开发和研究学习环境的多种变体，在其中操纵这些载体，从而调查近距离和远距离迁移。 该项目将开发基于MUVE的课程，以情境或建构主义学习的替代模式为中心，并将评估其对学生动机和学习的不同结果，以及界面可用性和课堂实施。该项目将在波士顿公立学校（BPS）教室实施这些替代课程，这些教室中ESL和免费和减少午餐的学生比例很高，将实验教室与控制教室相匹配，以确定我们方法的相对有效性。

(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. Situated learning, a major theory about cognition and education, centers on apprenticeship in "communities of practice" (moving from newcomer to expert within a sociocultural structure of practices). MUVEs are a promising medium for fostering and assessing classroom-based situated learning because they can support immersive, extended experiences incorporating modeling and mentoring about problems similar to those in real world contexts. This project will extend an educational MUVE developed with prior NSF funding; its curriculum is based on a problem-solving community in which students gain knowledge through co-interpreting data with other participants who have varied levels of skills. This project will study whether such a virtual environment can sufficiently replicate authentic contexts and multi-leveled communities of practice to provide students with classroom experiences in situated learning.In addition, the limited ability of students to apply school-acquired knowledge to real world settings is a longstanding, crucial problem that a controlled study of instructional design for situated learning could help to clarify. "Transfer" is the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a real world setting requiring expert performance. MUVEs provide a unique experimental vehicle for studying how situated affordances (supports for particular activities created by relevant properties of the situation) and constraints (regularities that are invariant under the transformation that changes the learning situation into the transfer situation) affect students' capabilities for learning and transfer. Situated learning involves constellations of architectural, social, organizational, and material vectors that shape particular settings.This project will develop and study multiple variants of a learning environment in which these vectors are manipulated, allowing investigation into near and far transfer. The project will develop MUVE-based curricula centered on alternative models of situated or constructivist learning and will assess their differential outcomes for student motivation and learning, as well as interface usability and classroom implementation. The project will implement these alternative curricula in Boston Public School (BPS) classrooms with high proportions of ESL and free-and-reduced-lunch students, matching experimental to control classrooms to determine the relative efficacy of our approach.