Effective Collaborative Role-playing Environments

在线角色扮演环境为教授科学提供了令人兴奋的途径，对原本可能被排除在科学学习之外的学生尤其有效。然而，这样的环境构建成本很高，很难修改，而且很少支持协作。这个项目开发了关于探究、角色扮演、环境和协作的广泛愿景。将对智能辅导系统进行修改，以便对学生对话要素进行分类和分析，提供查询和协作的自动分析。导师使用句子开场白来监控每个学生的行为，这些开场白可以跟踪协作指标，并探索个人和集体活动的效果。调查人员将研究几种学习理论是否以及如何适用于多人活动。我们将比较个人和小组环境下的效率，并分析有效和不有效的小组环境下的学生策略。将开发各种工具，建立在以前NSF支持的发展批判性思维和科学深度学习的项目的基础上。该团队包括多学科和多机构的合作者，他们是计算机支持的协作学习、领域知识、探究性学习和课堂协作方面的专家。来自三个机构的计算机科学家、教育研究人员和生物学家将围绕调查案例开发活跃的、有吸引力的虚拟社区。约有350名学生和10名教师/教授将参加该项目，他们为不同种族和经济状况的学生服务。软件将免费提供，并可能对数十个科学学科的数千名学生产生广泛影响。

On-line role-playing environments provide exciting avenues for teaching science and are particularly effective with students who might otherwise be excluded from science study. However, such environments are expensive to build, difficult to modify and rarely support collaboration. This project develops a broad vision of inquiry role-playing environments and collaboration. An intelligent tutoring system will be modified to classify and analyze student dialogue elements providing automatic analysis of inquiry and collaboration. The tutor monitors each student's actions using sentence openers that track collaboration indicators and explore the effect of both individual and group activities. The investigators will examine whether and how several theories of learning apply to multi-player activities. A comparison of efficiency in individual and group settings will be made and student strategies analyzed in both effective and less effective group settings. A variety of tools will be developed, building on prior NSF supported projects that develop critical thinking and deep learning in science. The team includes multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional collaborators who are experts in computer supported collaborative learning, domain knowledge, inquiry learning and classroom collaboration. Computer scientists, educational researchers, and biologists from three institutions will develop active, engaging virtual communities around inquiry cases. Approximately 350 students and 10 teachers/professors serving ethnically and economically diverse students will participate in the project. Software will be freely available and potentially have a broad impact on thousands of students in dozens of science disciplines.