Collaborative Research: Exploring the Value of Learning by Teaching

一个普遍的直觉是，学习某样东西的最好方法之一就是尝试把它教给别人。 该研究项目正在测试这种直觉及其对教育实践的有用性。 这项工作的核心是基于网络的“可教代理人”，学生把教作为自己学习的一种方式，并允许对教学中的有效成分进行研究。 该项目将使用代理来帮助学生学习科学和数学内容，并帮助教师学习特定内容的教学法。 这项工作的智力价值在于，代理人提供了一种开发和测试学习理论的方法，该理论有助于解释通过教学学习的动机和认知益处。通过操纵可教代理的可用功能和用途（这对实际学生来说很难做到），可以通过教学交互来实验性地隔离学习的不同组成部分。 用于评估学生是否通过教学学习的主要措施包括评估学生在完成教学活动后从资源中学习的能力。更广泛的影响包括帮助教师了解学生学习的新方法，以及开发易于分发的软件，这些软件体现了新的学习原则，以便学校和行业中的其他人可以从这些工件中学习并创建自己的新工件。

It is a common intuition that one of the best ways to learn something is to attempt to teach it to others. The research project is testing this intuition and its usefulness for educational practice. Central to the work are web-based "teachable agents" that students teach as a way to learn themselves and that permit studies of the active ingredients of learning by teaching. The project will use the agents to help students learn science and mathematics content and help teachers learn content-specific pedagogy. The intellectual merit of the work is that the agents provide a method for developing and testing a learning theory that helps explain the motivational and cognitive benefits of learning by teaching. By manipulating a teachable agent's available features and use (something that is hard to do with actual pupils), it is possible to experimentally isolate different components of the learning by teaching interaction. A primary measure used to evaluate whether students learn by teaching includes assessments of students' abilities to subsequently learn from resources once they have completed their teaching activities. The broader impacts include a new way of helping teachers understand the learning of their students, and the development of easily distributed, software that embodies new learning principles so that others in schools and industry can learn from those artifacts and create new ones of their own.