Studying Situated Learning and Knowledge Transfer in a Multi-user Virtual Environment

(1)以课堂为基础的情境学习；(2)虚拟环境可能有助于将课堂学习转移到现实世界环境的方式。情境学习是一种关于认知和教育的主要理论，其核心是“实践社区”中的学徒制（在实践的社会文化结构中从新人转变为专家）。muve是促进和评估基于课堂的情境学习的一种很有前途的媒介，因为它们可以支持沉浸式的扩展体验，包括建模和指导类似于现实世界背景中的问题。该项目将扩展先前由美国国家科学基金会资助开发的教育MUVE；它的课程基于一个解决问题的社区，在这个社区中，学生通过与其他具有不同技能水平的参与者共同解释数据来获取知识。该项目将研究这种虚拟环境是否能够充分复制真实情境和多层次的实践社区，为学生提供情境学习的课堂体验。此外，学生将学校获得的知识应用于现实世界环境的能力有限是一个长期存在的关键问题，对情境学习教学设计的对照研究可以帮助澄清这一问题。“迁移”是将在一种情况下学到的知识应用到另一种情况中，如果学习任务的指导导致在迁移任务中的表现提高，则会得到证明，通常是在需要专家表现的真实世界环境中。muve提供了一种独特的实验工具，用于研究情境支持（情境相关属性所创造的特定活动的支持）和约束（在学习情境向迁移情境转变的过程中保持不变的规律）如何影响学生的学习和迁移能力。情境学习涉及塑造特定环境的建筑、社会、组织和物质载体的星座。该项目将开发和研究学习环境的多种变体，在这种学习环境中，这些向量被操纵，允许调查近距离和远距离迁移。该项目将开发以muve为基础的课程，以情境或建构主义学习的替代模式为中心，并将评估其对学生动机和学习的不同结果，以及界面可用性和课堂实施。该项目将在波士顿公立学校（BPS）的教室中实施这些替代课程，这些教室中有很高比例的ESL学生和免费和减少午餐的学生，并将实验与控制教室相匹配，以确定我们方法的相对有效性。

(1) classroom-based situated learning and (2) the ways in which virtual environments may aid the transfer of learning from classroom contexts into real world settings. Situated learning, a major theory about cognition and education, centers on apprenticeship in "communities of practice" (moving from newcomer to expert within a sociocultural structure of practices). MUVEs are a promising medium for fostering and assessing classroom-based situated learning because they can support immersive, extended experiences incorporating modeling and mentoring about problems similar to those in real world contexts. This project will extend an educational MUVE developed with prior NSF funding; its curriculum is based on a problem-solving community in which students gain knowledge through co-interpreting data with other participants who have varied levels of skills. This project will study whether such a virtual environment can sufficiently replicate authentic contexts and multi-leveled communities of practice to provide students with classroom experiences in situated learning.In addition, the limited ability of students to apply school-acquired knowledge to real world settings is a longstanding, crucial problem that a controlled study of instructional design for situated learning could help to clarify. "Transfer" is the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a real world setting requiring expert performance. MUVEs provide a unique experimental vehicle for studying how situated affordances (supports for particular activities created by relevant properties of the situation) and constraints (regularities that are invariant under the transformation that changes the learning situation into the transfer situation) affect students' capabilities for learning and transfer. Situated learning involves constellations of architectural, social, organizational, and material vectors that shape particular settings.This project will develop and study multiple variants of a learning environment in which these vectors are manipulated, allowing investigation into near and far transfer. The project will develop MUVE-based curricula centered on alternative models of situated or constructivist learning and will assess their differential outcomes for student motivation and learning, as well as interface usability and classroom implementation. The project will implement these alternative curricula in Boston Public School (BPS) classrooms with high proportions of ESL and free-and-reduced-lunch students, matching experimental to control classrooms to determine the relative efficacy of our approach.