Effective Collaborative Role-playing Environments

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On-line role-playing environments provide exciting avenues for teaching science and are particularly effective with students who might otherwise be excluded from science study. However, such environments are expensive to build, difficult to modify and rarely support collaboration. This project develops a broad vision of inquiry role-playing environments and collaboration. An intelligent tutoring system will be modified to classify and analyze student dialogue elements providing automatic analysis of inquiry and collaboration. The tutor monitors each student's actions using sentence openers that track collaboration indicators and explore the effect of both individual and group activities. The investigators will examine whether and how several theories of learning apply to multi-player activities. A comparison of efficiency in individual and group settings will be made and student strategies analyzed in both effective and less effective group settings. A variety of tools will be developed, building on prior NSF supported projects that develop critical thinking and deep learning in science. The team includes multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional collaborators who are experts in computer supported collaborative learning, domain knowledge, inquiry learning and classroom collaboration. Computer scientists, educational researchers, and biologists from three institutions will develop active, engaging virtual communities around inquiry cases. Approximately 350 students and 10 teachers/professors serving ethnically and economically diverse students will participate in the project. Software will be freely available and potentially have a broad impact on thousands of students in dozens of science disciplines.