Modeling Cyber-Enabled Learning and Teaching: Addressing Methodological and Measurement Issues

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This proposal responds to the need for realizing the potential of cyber-infrastructure for education and argues that in order for cyber-enabled learning to be realized and used, three important issues must be addressed: (a) It is critical to be able to characterize what is meant by cyber-enabled learning; (b) multiple approaches to gathering evidence of sophisticated cyber-enabled learning must be developed; and (c) learning must be attributable to participation in the identified cyber-enabled learning. The project, therefore, has three goals: (1) to characterize cyber-enabled learning using a case study; (2) to identify the assessment and psychometric issues related to assessing cyber-enabled learning; and (3) to propose methodological solutions to modeling learning in such complex learning environments. The focus of the stduy is on a substantial case study in geoscience, which employs science content that is accessible to a wide range of the education community, and which draws on known areas of research, particularly scientific visualization: the study of earthquakes, tsunamis, and related phenomena. This project asks: What is the character of analytical reasoning for geoscience within a networked, cyber-infrastructure framework, and what counts as evidence for such reasoning? What assessment and psychometric issues must be addressed? What are the methodological challenges in modeling and assessing learning within this cyber-infrastructure project? For example, how are claims of causality handled in a complex networked and nested learning environment, and what evidence would make such claims credible? This project addresses potentially new concepts by examining the transformative and dynamic nature of cyber-infrastructure.