EAGER: A Training Tool to Help Teachers Recognize and Reduce Bias in Their Classroom Behaviors and Increase Interpersonal Competence

老师说什么很重要，但他们怎么说也很重要。非语言行为可以无意中传达教师的情绪状态和个人偏见的信息。不良的非语言沟通会影响教师授课、评估学生和管理课堂的能力。有效的非语言交流可以提高学生的参与度，改善课堂管理，让学生感受到老师对他们的关心。与非语言有效沟通的老师的学生更有动力学习，并表现出更大的学业进步。非语言沟通是一种可以通过指导和反思来提高的技能。该项目将与学生和教师合作，在虚拟现实中建立跟踪教师运动的培训模块原型。这将比较教师的非语言行为与转化后的非语言行为，这将有效地吸引学生。它还将给来自代表性不足背景的学生提供机会，通过参观实验室来观察和参与我们在康奈尔大学和北德克萨斯大学的研究。这项探索性研究早期拨款（EAGER）将通过探索非语言行为如何在虚拟现实教室中表达和最好地转化，以及如何将在虚拟现实环境中学习的技能转移到物理教室的教学中，为教育和学习技术领域做出贡献。这一探索将促进我们对教师如何在课堂上有效使用非语言行为的理论理解，并开发新的技术来帮助教师识别和有选择地使非语言行为适应中小班级（5-30名学生）的个别学生的人际沟通风格。通过开发新的界面来显示情境化的非语言行为并促进对这种行为的反思，该探索还将有助于人机交互领域，以及通过开发新的语料库和理论模型来证明非语言行为如何在课堂环境中得到证明，从而促进社会心理学、传播学、计算机媒介传播（CMC）、教师教育和计算机支持的协同工作领域。这种渴望将有助于设计指导方针，指导如何帮助非语言行为的自我反思，以及教师和学生如何在课堂上解释行为。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

What teachers say is important, but how they say it is also important. Nonverbal behavior can unintentionally convey information about teachers’ emotional states and personal biases. Poor nonverbal communication can affect teachers’ abilities to deliver lessons, assess students and manage classrooms. Effective nonverbal communication increases student engagement, improves classroom management, and make students feel that the teacher cares about them. Students with teachers who communicate effectively nonverbally are more motivated to learn and demonstrate more academic progress. Nonverbal communication is a skill that can be improved with guidance and reflection. This project will work with students and teachers to prototype training modules in virtual reality that track teacher movement. This will compare teachers’ nonverbal behaviors with transformed nonverbal behaviors that would effectively engage students. It will also give students from underrepresented backgrounds the opportunity to observe and participate in our research at both Cornell University and University of North Texas through lab visits.This Early Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) will contribute to the fields of education and learning technologies by exploring how nonverbal behaviors are expressed and can best be transformed in virtual reality classrooms, and how skills learned in virtual reality environments can be transferred to teaching in physical classrooms. This exploration will advance our theoretical understanding of how teachers use nonverbal behavior effectively in the classroom and develop novel techniques for helping teachers to recognize and selectively adapt nonverbal behavior to their individual students’ interpersonal communication styles in the context of small to medium classes (5-30 students). The exploration will also contribute to the field of human-computer interaction through the development of novel interfaces to display contextualized nonverbal behavior and promote reflection on this behavior, as well as to the fields of social psychology, communication, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), teacher education, and computer-supported collaborative work by developing new corpora and theoretical models of how nonverbal behaviors are evidenced in classroom settings. This EAGER will contribute to designing guidelines on how to aid self-reflection on nonverbal behavior, and how behavior is interpreted in the classroom by both teachers and students.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.