Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

在教师教育中，人们普遍认为，学习教学要求职前教师在磨练教学实践的过程中，有强大的、真实的和持续的机会从事教学工作——最好是在不同的背景下，面对不同的学生群体，为了不同的目的。K-12课堂的实践教学经验，如实地实习和学生教学，是提供这些机会的最广泛使用的方法。在一个理想的世界里，这些经历是职前教师观察和与导师老师密切合作的机会，也是对K-12学生个人、小组和整个班级尝试新的教学策略的机会。虽然这些经验对支持职前教师的学习至关重要，但很难帮助职前教师从大学课堂过渡到实地实习，为他们提供制定雄心勃勃的教学策略的机会。这种需求在数学和科学教育中尤为突出，因为在这些领域，以强有力的学科论述和论证为模式的课堂并不总是普遍存在。COVID-19大流行的环境加剧了这一挑战；随着全国各地的学校和大学在线运营，许多职前教师将失去在课程和K-12教室中实践教学的机会。为了应对STEM教育中的这一紧迫挑战，项目研究人员将开发、试点和完善一套协调和互补的活动，教师教育项目可以在在线和面对面的环境中使用这些活动，为职前教师提供基于实践的机会，以培养他们促进数学和科学中以论证为中心的讨论的能力，这是这些内容领域的关键教学实践。以实践为基础的活动包括：(1)创建有针对性的实践空间的交互式在线数字游戏，以吸引职前教师响应学生以内容为中心的想法和互动；(2)利用基于绩效的任务，在模拟教室中促进与小学高年级或初中学生的小组讨论；(3)沉浸式虚拟现实全课堂环境，允许教师化身和24名学生化身之间进行语言、文本和非语言互动。由这些活动以及帮助教师教育工作者有效利用这些活动的支持组成的在线实践套件，不仅是应对COVID-19挑战的直接补救措施，而且是一套丰富而灵活的资源，有可能在COVID-19挑战之外支持和改善教师的准备工作。本研究将以设计为基础的研究来创造这个整合系统的实践教学机会。该方法将包括开发和完善个人实践活动、综合在线实践套件和教师教育支持材料，通过与教师教育实践社区合作，并在为期三年的项目中参与多达20名教师教育工作者和400名职前教师的多轮选拔和试点。该项目将分三个阶段进行：第一阶段进行小规模测试，第二阶段由隶属于项目团队的教育教师试用教材，第三阶段由更广泛的数学和科学教育教师试用教材。数据来源包括职前教师的背景特征调查、对实践活动的看法、对内容教学的看法、对教学准备的看法、对论证和讨论的理解、每次实践教学活动的录像和/或日志文件，以及他们的实践教学表现分数。项目团队还将观察每次实践教学活动前后的课堂教学活动，与教师教育者进行访谈，并收集教师教育者的教学日志和用于支持职前教师学习的教学文物。数据分析将包括职前和职后比较，以检验职前数学和科学教师的信念、观念、理解和教学绩效增长的证据。项目团队还将构建一系列分析备忘录，以描述每个教师教育者如何在数学或科学方法课程中使用在线实践套件，以及每个用例中的因素和决策。然后，他们将描述和理解在这些不同的环境中，各种用途和适应如何与环境因素联系起来。研究结果将用于为这些类型的基于实践的活动提供经验和理论基础的设计原则和启发，以支持教师的学习。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

In teacher education it is widely acknowledged that learning to teach requires that preservice teachers have robust, authentic, and consistent opportunities to engage in the work of teaching--ideally across different contexts, with diverse student populations, and for varied purposes--as they hone their instructional practice. Practice teaching experiences in K-12 classrooms, such as field placements and student teaching, are the most widely used approaches to provide these opportunities. In an ideal world these experiences are opportunities for preservice teachers to observe and work closely with mentor teachers and try out new instructional strategies with individual, small groups, and whole classes of K-12 students. While these experiences are critical to supporting preservice teachers’ learning, it can be difficult to help preservice teachers transition from university classrooms to field placements in ways that provide them with opportunities to enact ambitious instructional strategies. This need is particularly acute in mathematics and science education, where classrooms that model strong disciplinary discourse and argumentation are not always prevalent. This challenge is amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic environment; with schools and universities across the nation operating online, many preservice teachers will miss out on opportunities to practice teaching both within their courses and in K-12 classrooms. To address this urgent challenge in STEM education, project researchers will develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary activities that teacher education programs can use in both online and face-to-face settings to provide practice-based opportunities for preservice teachers to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science, a critical teaching practice in these content areas. The practice-based activities include: (1) interactive, online digital games that create targeted practice spaces to engage preservice teachers to respond to students’ content-focused ideas and interactions; (2) facilitating group discussions with upper elementary or middle school student avatars in a simulated classroom using performance-based tasks; and (3) an immersive virtual reality whole-classroom environment that allows for verbal, textual and non-verbal interactions between a teacher avatar and 24 student avatars. The online practice suite, made up of these activities along with supports to help teacher educators use them effectively, represents not just an immediate remedy to the challenge of COVID-19, but a rich and flexible set of resources with the potential to support and improve teacher preparation well beyond the COVID-19 challenge.This study will use design-based research to create this integrated system of practice teaching opportunities. This approach will involve developing and refining the individual practice activities, the integrated online practice suite, and the teacher educator support materials by working with a teacher educator community of practice and engaging up to 20 teacher educators and 400 preservice teachers in multiple rounds of tryouts and piloting during the three-year project. The project will proceed in three phases: a first phase of small-scale testing, a second phase trying the materials with teacher educators affiliated with the project team, and a third phase piloting materials with a broader group of mathematics and science teacher educators. Data sources include surveys of preservice teachers’ background characteristics, perceptions of the practice activities, beliefs about content instruction, perceptions about preparedness to teach, and understanding of argumentation and discussion, videos and/or log files of their performances for each practice teaching activity, and scores on their practice teaching performances. The project team will also observe the in-class instructional activities prior to and after the use of each practice teaching activity, conduct interviews with teacher educators, and collect instructional logs from the teacher educators and instructional artifacts used to support preservice teachers’ learning. Data analysis will include pre and post comparisons to examine evidence of growth in preservice math and science teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, understanding, and teaching performance. The project team will also build a series of analytic memos to describe how each teacher educator used the online practice suite within the mathematics or science methods course and the factors and decisions that went into that each use case. Then, they will describe and understand how the various uses and adaptations may be linked to contextual factors within these diverse settings. Findings will be used to produce empirically and theoretically grounded design principles and heuristics for these types of practice-based activities to support teacher learning.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.