SBIR Phase II: Online Game to Assess and Improve Behavioral Readiness and Social Emotional Skills for Students in Kindergarten and First Grades

SBIR 第二阶段：评估和提高幼儿园和一年级学生行为准备度和社交情感技能的在线游戏

• 批准号: 1853055
• 负责人: James Thomas
• 金额: $ 74.99万
• 依托单位: Personalized Learning Games, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-04-01 至 2022-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1853055&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; II; Online; Game

This SBIR Phase II project aims to create and test a game-based intelligent tutoring system that both assesses and improves the behavioral readiness and social emotional skills of Kindergarten and 1st grade students. Research has shown that early intervention for children with social skill deficiencies is critical for success in the classroom and success in life. Children from vulnerable, underserved social niches are particularly likely to be 'less ready' for school, including those who experience poverty, family instability, and trauma, each of which disproportionately impact children from racial and ethnic minority groups. The game being developed by this project empowers educators to provide that much needed social emotional learning support for their young students. First, it provides an affordable, feasible, and scaleable means for identifying the social emotional needs of young students as they transition to formal schooling. Second, it enables educators to quickly translate this formative assessment data into personalized, digital intervention that can be applied with K1 students on a much broader scale than is possible with traditional, in-person services. And lastly, because this innovation is game-based and fun, students are more likely to fully engage and fully benefit from the embedded instruction. This project will advance understanding of how an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) can be used effectively to help educators provide social emotional instruction to all students. Within academic domains such as science and mathematics, many successful ITS implementations have employed learning models where answers to problems and the knowledge being evaluated can be easily represented. However, traditional ITS techniques have not been as effective in domains like social emotional learning, where the connection between what a student does and what the student knows is less well-defined. This project will develop several significant innovations for ITS that apply to social and emotional learning, but may also be useful in other, less well-defined learning domains. These innovations are represented by our adaptive Student Model and Tutorial Manager which collectively enhance student learning via personalization, pacing, and engagement. As more student data is collected, the student model will become increasingly accurate, leading to more intelligent choices from the tutorial manager to better enhance the social tutoring of our innovation and thereby, student learning. In addition to addressing significant societal and market needs, research findings from this SBIR will be published to more broadly inform the efforts of the ITS community.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.

SBIR第二阶段项目旨在创建和测试一个基于游戏的智能辅导系统，该系统可以评估和提高幼儿园和一年级学生的行为准备和社交情感技能。研究表明，对有社交技能缺陷的儿童进行早期干预对于在课堂上取得成功和在生活中取得成功至关重要。来自弱势、服务不足的社会小环境的儿童特别可能“不太准备好”上学，包括那些经历贫困、家庭不稳定和创伤的儿童，每一种情况都对来自种族和少数民族群体的儿童产生不成比例的影响。这个项目正在开发的游戏使教育工作者能够为他们的年轻学生提供急需的社会情感学习支持。首先，它提供了一个负担得起的，可行的，可扩展的手段，确定社会情感需求的年轻学生，因为他们过渡到正规学校。其次，它使教育工作者能够快速将这种形成性评估数据转化为个性化的数字干预，这种干预可以在比传统的面对面服务更广泛的范围内应用于K1学生。最后，由于这种创新是基于游戏的，有趣的，学生更有可能充分参与并充分受益于嵌入式教学。该项目将促进理解如何有效地使用智能辅导系统（ITS）来帮助教育工作者为所有学生提供社会情感指导。在科学和数学等学术领域，许多成功的ITS实施都采用了学习模型，其中问题的答案和被评估的知识可以很容易地表示。然而，传统的ITS技术在社会情感学习等领域并不有效，在这些领域，学生所做的事情和学生所知道的事情之间的联系不那么明确。该项目将为ITS开发几个适用于社会和情感学习的重要创新，但也可能在其他定义不太明确的学习领域中有用。这些创新以我们的自适应学生模型和教程管理器为代表，它们通过个性化、节奏和参与度共同增强学生的学习。随着收集更多的学生数据，学生模型将变得越来越准确，从而使教程管理器做出更明智的选择，以更好地增强我们创新的社交辅导，从而提高学生的学习能力。除了满足重要的社会和市场需求外，该SBIR的研究成果将被公布，以更广泛地为ITS社区的努力提供信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。