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

正规教育的一个重要目标是让学生在没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。我们正在研究学习自我评价的社会基础。具体来说，我们假设，在可识别的条件下，评估他人可以支持自我评估，从而促进内容学习，并制定可以在未来应用的自我评估策略。在这个项目中，我们利用了可教代理技术，学生通过使用格式良好的视觉表示来教授计算机代理。可教代理，使用简单的人工智能技术，然后可以根据他们所教的内容进行推理。这就为自我评价创造了最优条件，因为学生对代理人表现的评价也是对自己知识的评价。这项工作发生在向中学生教授相互依存和平衡的关键生态系统概念的背景下。学生将首先创建与他们的池塘和河流生态系统课程相关联的可教学代理，并利用这一学习经验创建一个新的可教学代理，该代理可以在家庭水族馆系统中维持多条鱼。学生还将在新的家庭作业模式中使用可教代理，该模式利用当前家庭电脑使用的趋势，并将正式和非正式环境中的学习联系起来；学生们登录，彼此聊天，他们的代理在一个在线虚拟环境中相互交流。总体而言，拟议的项目结合了先进技术工具辅助下的三个重要研究领域：科学动态过程的学习；学习自我评价的社会基础以及正规和非正规学习环境之间联系的改善。

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.