Abstract: This Virtual Lab project is a research study that is being conducted in nine public high school classrooms in Orange county, to document the use of the Virtual Lab software and to contribute to the further development of the program using the voices of students as they use and react to the software. This study is contributing to the efforts of educational technology specialists at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), NASA.
Introduction: Evolving Concepts of Learning, Teaching Styles, & Educational Technology
Student Voices: While educators seek to attract students to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) educational software provides an environment to test scientific concepts using real-time data, while also drawing on a world of gaming skills and video interaction that is commonplace to many children growing up today in the United States. While students may relate the increasing levels of interactivity in the classrooms to their own media-infused lives outside of the classroom, rarely are students asked to contribute to the development and design of educational software. BellSouth’s edu.pwr3 technology initiative has found that students' view of technology in learning is different from the view of schools, but we can question how often student voices are used to develop educational technology that is meaningful, while incorporating student perspectives into the design process.
Increasing Autonomy: Educational technologists have been giving children increasing autonomy over their own learning. This has been evident in early LOGO environments and microworlds first developed in the 1960s at MIT (Papert, 1980; Clements& Battista,1989; Resnick, 1994) and it is also apparent in the virtual worlds that are being developed today at Harvard (Dede, 1995; Salzman, Dede, Loftin, Bowen, and Chen, 1997). Alongside the technology, we have seen an expansion in our ability to understand how learning takes place outside of the boundaries set up using traditional classroom methods, like lectures or worksheets.
Expanding Knowledge of Teaching and Learning: We know more about situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1999) or how students learn in an apprenticeship model, moving from novices towards becoming experts, as across cultures “learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners . . . the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (Lave & Wenger, 1999, p. 29). With the increasing use of technology, has come an increasing need for anchored instruction (Bransford, 1990). Anchored instruction is a case-based approach to learning that enables students to focus on a problem and “to pay attention to their own perception and comprehension of these problems” (Bransford, Sherwood, Hasselbring, Kinzer, and Williams, 1990, p. 123).
The Problem: The rapid evolution of technology and our growing understanding of how children think and learn leads nowhere if the programs currently being developed do not reach the children, 1) because of technology access issues or 2) because the classroom environment does not permit teaching and learning strategies that take advantage of the developing, interactive technologies. Even if these two problems are solved, the students may not use the software if the programs are not meaningful to their lives.
The Virtual Lab
Software: The Virtual
Lab is a CD-ROM based program providing a navigable 3d lab environment that
can house a variety of scientific instruments. This project was funded through
the NASA Learning Technologies Project and targets high school and entry-level
college students. The project's concept grew from educators' desire to have
access to sophisticated scientific instruments available at NASA. The cost of
these instruments makes such access prohibitive for untrained use. The software
provides a benign environment with enough information and realism to give students
the experience of operating the actual instrument. Its design focuses on providing
a tool that is educational and engaging to students. Methods for
Documenting the Impact by Summer 2005: By summer of 2005 this study will have documented the conditions within which the software was tested, using a pre-test and
a post-test, on three groups of high school students. Group A (composed of 90 students,
or 3 classrooms) received technology, their teachers were trained, and
they participated in actively critiquing the program in the 2004-2005 school year. Group B (composed
of 90 students, or 3 classrooms) received the technology without the training or active participation in critiquing the program. Group C (composed of 90 students,
or 3 classrooms) was a control group, typifying “normal” conditions
before the study intervention, they did not receive technology nor did they
receive training. At the conclusion of the study, all teachers and classrooms
received training and technology. Every high school that participated had
have one classroom in group A, and another in group B, and a third in group
C. The high schools were selected using federally-mandated criteria designating schools that receive aid programs. Methods for Capturing
Student Voices by Summer 2005: Three types
of data were collected. 1) Specifically focusing on Group A, researchers
spent time in classrooms documenting students’ on screen use of the
technology as well as their voices, as they narrate their reactions and experience
navigating the software program without interruption (Dumas & Redish,1993).
2) Cognitive interviewing techniques were also used to document student perspectives in response to specific questions during their software use (Ericsson &
Simon, 1993). 3) Students and teachers in Group A were asked to create brief narrative or scenarios illustrating how they would use the technology to teach a specific concept to other students.