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

(1)基于课堂的情境学习和(2)虚拟环境可以帮助将学习从课堂环境转移到现实世界环境的方式。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”(从新手到实践的社会文化结构中的专家的转变)中的学徒制。MUVE是一种很有前途的促进和评估基于课堂的情境学习的媒介，因为它们可以支持沉浸式的扩展体验，包括关于类似于现实世界环境中的问题的建模和指导。该项目将扩展之前由国家科学基金会资助开发的教育MUVE；其课程基于一个问题解决社区，在该社区中，学生通过与具有不同技能水平的其他参与者共同解释数据来获得知识。本项目将研究这种虚拟环境是否能够充分复制真实的情境和多层次的实践社区，为学生提供情境学习的课堂体验。此外，学生将从学校获得的知识应用于现实世界的能力有限是一个长期存在的关键问题，通过对情境学习教学设计的对照研究可以帮助澄清这一问题。“迁移”是将在一种情况下学到的知识应用到另一种情况下，如果学习任务的教学能提高迁移任务的表现，通常是需要专家表现的真实环境。MUVE提供了一种独特的实验工具，用于研究情境提供(由情境的相关性质创造的对特定活动的支持)和约束(在将学习情境转变为迁移情境的转换下保持不变的规律)如何影响学生的学习和迁移能力。情境学习涉及形成特定环境的建筑、社会、组织和材料向量的星座。本项目将开发和研究在其中操纵这些向量的学习环境的多种变体，从而能够调查近距离和远距离迁移。该项目将开发以MUVE为基础的课程，以情境或建构主义学习的替代模式为中心，并将评估它们在学生动机和学习以及界面可用性和课堂实施方面的不同结果。该项目将在波士顿公立学校(BPS)高比例的ESL和免费和减少午餐的学生的教室中实施这些替代课程，将实验教室与对照教室相匹配，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.