Collaborative Research: REESE- Assisting and Assessing Middle School Science Learning in Formal and Informal Settings

正规教育的一个重要目标是为学生在不再有课堂监督的情况下为未来的学习做好准备。为了继续学习，人们需要学会自我评估自己的进步和理解。我们正在调查学习自我评估的社会基础。具体地说，我们假设，在可识别的条件下，评估他人可以支持促进内容学习的自我评估，以及开发可在未来应用的自我评估策略的能力。在这个项目中，我们利用可教学的代理技术，学生通过使用格式良好的视觉表征来教授计算机代理来学习。可受教育的代理使用简单的人工智能技术，然后可以根据教给他们的东西进行推理。这为自我评估创造了最佳条件，因为学生对代理人表现的评估也是对他们自身知识的评估。这项工作是在向中学生传授相互依存和平衡的关键生态系统概念的背景下进行的。学生首先将创建与他们关于池塘和河流生态系统的课程相联系的可授课代理，并利用这一学习经验创建一种新的可授课代理，该代理可以在家庭水族馆系统中维持多种鱼的生存。学生还将在一种新的家庭作业模式中使用可教授的代理，该模式利用家庭计算机使用的当前趋势，并在正式和非正式环境中连接学习；学生登录，彼此聊天，他们的代理在在线虚拟环境中与其他代理交互。总体而言，拟议的项目加入了由先进技术工具协助的三个重要研究方向：科学动态过程的学习；学习自我评估的社会基础；以及改善正式和非正式学习环境之间的联系。

An important goal of formal education is to prepare students for future learning when there is no longer classroom supervision. To continue learning, people need to learn to self-assess their own progress and understanding. We are investigating the social basis of self-assessment for learning. Specifically, we hypothesize that, under identifiable conditions, assessing others can support self-assessments that promote content learning plus the ability to develop self-assessment strategies that can be applied in the future. In this project, we take advantage of Teachable Agent technologies where students learn by teaching computer agents through the use of well-formed visual representations. Teachable Agents, using simple artificial intelligence techniques, can then reason based on what they have been taught. This creates optimal conditions for self-assessment, because students' assessments of their agents' performance is also an assessment of their own knowledge. The work occurs in the context of teaching the key ecosystem concepts of interdependence and balance to middle school students. Students will first create Teachable Agents that are linked to their curriculum on pond and river ecosystems, and use this learning experience to create a new Teachable Agent that can sustain multiple fish in a home aquarium system. Students will also use the Teachable Agents in a new homework model that leverages current trends in home computer use and connects learning in formal and informal settings; students log on, chat with one another, and their agents interact with another in an on-line virtual environment. Overall, the proposed project joins three important strands of research assisted by advanced technology tools: The learning of dynamic processes in science; the social basis of self-assessments for learning; and, the improvement of connections between formal and informal learning settings.