Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

在教师教育中，人们普遍认为，学会教学要求职前教师在磨练教学实践时，有强有力的、真实的和持续的机会从事教学工作--理想的情况是跨越不同的背景，有不同的学生群体，以及不同的目的。在K-12课堂的实践教学经验，如实地实习和学生教学，是提供这些机会的最广泛使用的方法。在理想的情况下，这些体验是职前教师观察并与指导教师密切合作的机会，并与K-12学生的个人、小组和整个班级一起尝试新的教学策略。虽然这些经验对支持职前教师的学习至关重要，但很难帮助职前教师从大学课堂过渡到实地工作，为他们提供制定雄心勃勃的教学战略的机会。这一需求在数学和科学教育中尤为迫切，在那里，模仿强烈的纪律话语和辩论的课堂并不总是普遍存在。新冠肺炎大流行的环境放大了这一挑战；随着全国各地的学校和大学都在网上运营，许多职前教师将错过在自己的课程和K-12课堂上实践教学的机会。为了应对STEM教育中的这一紧迫挑战，项目研究人员将开发、试点和完善一套协调和补充的活动，教师教育计划可以在在线和面对面的环境中使用这些活动，为职前教师提供以实践为基础的机会，以发展他们的能力，促进以辩论为重点的数学和科学讨论，这是这些内容领域的关键教学实践。基于实践的活动包括：(1)互动的在线数字游戏，创建有针对性的练习空间，以吸引职前教师回应学生以内容为中心的想法和互动；(2)在模拟教室中使用基于表现的任务促进与高年级或中学生化身的小组讨论；以及(3)沉浸式虚拟现实全课堂环境，允许教师化身与24名学生化身之间的言语、文本和非语言互动。由这些活动以及帮助教师教育工作者有效使用它们的支持组成的在线实践套件，不仅代表着对新冠肺炎挑战的即时补救措施，而且是一套丰富而灵活的资源，有潜力支持和改进教师准备工作，远远超越新冠肺炎的挑战。本研究将使用基于设计的研究来创建这个集成的实践教学机会系统。这一方法将包括开发和完善个人实践活动、综合在线实践套件和教师教育工作者支持材料，方法是与教师教育工作者实践社区合作，并在为期三年的项目期间邀请多达20名教师教育工作者和400名职前教师参加多轮试行和试点。该项目将分三个阶段进行：第一阶段是小规模测试，第二阶段是与项目团队的教师教育工作者一起尝试材料，第三阶段是与更广泛的数学和科学教师教育人员一起试用材料。数据来源包括职前教师的背景特征调查、对实践活动的看法、对教学内容的信念、对教学准备的看法、对辩论和讨论的理解、他们在每次实践教学活动中的表现的视频和/或日志文件，以及他们的实践教学表现的分数。项目组还将观察每项实践教学活动使用前后的课堂教学活动，与教师教育工作者进行访谈，并收集教师教育工作者的教学日志和用于支持职前教师学习的教学文物。数据分析将包括前和后的比较，以检查在职前数学和科学教师的信念、认知、理解和教学表现方面的增长证据。项目团队还将创建一系列分析备忘录，描述每位教师教育工作者如何在数学或科学方法课程中使用在线练习套件，以及每个用例中的因素和决策。然后，他们将描述和理解不同的使用和改编如何与这些不同环境中的语境因素联系起来。研究结果将被用来为这些类型的以实践为基础的活动产生经验和理论上的设计原则和启发式方法，以支持教师的学习。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In teacher education it is widely acknowledged that learning to teach requires that preservice teachers have robust, authentic, and consistent opportunities to engage in the work of teaching--ideally across different contexts, with diverse student populations, and for varied purposes--as they hone their instructional practice. Practice teaching experiences in K-12 classrooms, such as field placements and student teaching, are the most widely used approaches to provide these opportunities. In an ideal world these experiences are opportunities for preservice teachers to observe and work closely with mentor teachers and try out new instructional strategies with individual, small groups, and whole classes of K-12 students. While these experiences are critical to supporting preservice teachers’ learning, it can be difficult to help preservice teachers transition from university classrooms to field placements in ways that provide them with opportunities to enact ambitious instructional strategies. This need is particularly acute in mathematics and science education, where classrooms that model strong disciplinary discourse and argumentation are not always prevalent. This challenge is amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic environment; with schools and universities across the nation operating online, many preservice teachers will miss out on opportunities to practice teaching both within their courses and in K-12 classrooms. To address this urgent challenge in STEM education, project researchers will develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary activities that teacher education programs can use in both online and face-to-face settings to provide practice-based opportunities for preservice teachers to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science, a critical teaching practice in these content areas. The practice-based activities include: (1) interactive, online digital games that create targeted practice spaces to engage preservice teachers to respond to students’ content-focused ideas and interactions; (2) facilitating group discussions with upper elementary or middle school student avatars in a simulated classroom using performance-based tasks; and (3) an immersive virtual reality whole-classroom environment that allows for verbal, textual and non-verbal interactions between a teacher avatar and 24 student avatars. The online practice suite, made up of these activities along with supports to help teacher educators use them effectively, represents not just an immediate remedy to the challenge of COVID-19, but a rich and flexible set of resources with the potential to support and improve teacher preparation well beyond the COVID-19 challenge.This study will use design-based research to create this integrated system of practice teaching opportunities. This approach will involve developing and refining the individual practice activities, the integrated online practice suite, and the teacher educator support materials by working with a teacher educator community of practice and engaging up to 20 teacher educators and 400 preservice teachers in multiple rounds of tryouts and piloting during the three-year project. The project will proceed in three phases: a first phase of small-scale testing, a second phase trying the materials with teacher educators affiliated with the project team, and a third phase piloting materials with a broader group of mathematics and science teacher educators. Data sources include surveys of preservice teachers’ background characteristics, perceptions of the practice activities, beliefs about content instruction, perceptions about preparedness to teach, and understanding of argumentation and discussion, videos and/or log files of their performances for each practice teaching activity, and scores on their practice teaching performances. The project team will also observe the in-class instructional activities prior to and after the use of each practice teaching activity, conduct interviews with teacher educators, and collect instructional logs from the teacher educators and instructional artifacts used to support preservice teachers’ learning. Data analysis will include pre and post comparisons to examine evidence of growth in preservice math and science teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, understanding, and teaching performance. The project team will also build a series of analytic memos to describe how each teacher educator used the online practice suite within the mathematics or science methods course and the factors and decisions that went into that each use case. Then, they will describe and understand how the various uses and adaptations may be linked to contextual factors within these diverse settings. Findings will be used to produce empirically and theoretically grounded design principles and heuristics for these types of practice-based activities to support teacher learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.