Harvard Graduate School of Education | Deborah Blagg
When middle school students describe something they did in school as “cool,” “exciting,” and “fun,” educators who are more accustomed to hearing “Why are we learning this?” tend to sit up and take notice. Over the past several years, Professor Chris Dede and postdoctoral fellow Patrick O’Shea have been pursuing the U.S. Department of Education Star Schools-funded research that, in its early stages, seems to be capturing the imaginations of teachers and students alike. The project — which was conducted in collaboration with research assistants Catherine “Sam” Johnston, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’09; Rebecca Mitchell, Ed.D.’09; and former postdoctoral associate Matt Dunleavy — leveraged the power and panache of handheld technologies to enhance middle schoolers’ engagement in learning. For under-resourced schools, it also holds promise for addressing equity concerns when it comes to technology-based learning.
Dede has been studying immersive technology and issues at the juncture of science, education, and technology for more than three decades, working with students from public schools, the military, higher education, and the corporate world. O’Shea’s doctorate is in urban studies, with an educational technology focus. Collaborating with colleagues from MIT and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the two are completing analysis of a learning exercise they designed to use augmented reality (AR) — real world activities with a superimposed virtual simulation — as an instructional tool both to build middle-schoolers’ math and language arts skills and to spark excitement about learning.
“Most kids at this age tend to become disengaged from learning,” Dede said. “Technology gives us a way to recapture their attention. Also, many of them think academic subjects are abstract and have little to do with the world around them. Giving them an assignment that takes them out in their own neighborhoods immediately establishes the relevance of their task.”
The team developed two exercises for the purpose of formative evaluation. Alien Contact!, the first exercise, took place during the 2006-2007 academic year and involved students and teachers from two middle schools and one high school in the Boston area. Outfitted with cell phones and GPS-enabled, handheld computers, students at each school were directed to nearby locations to interview virtual characters and inspect digital items related to a mysterious alien invasion. Working through math and literacy problems enabled students to determine why the aliens had landed. Using the same technology, but incorporating lessons learned from Alien Contact!, the team tested a second curriculum in 2008. Gray Anatomy asked participants to solve the mystery of why a gray whale had beached itself nearby. In both exercises, students worked in groups, and each student in the group was assigned a unique role and received different clues or questions to answer. Assembling the pieces of the puzzle required not just factual knowledge, but also effective communication and collaboration.
LEARNING FROM ALIENS
“In terms of designing an augmented reality curriculum,” said O’Shea, “we were learning by doing. When you don’t have a blueprint, some things work well, but you also get a few surprises.” One unintended outcome in Alien Contact! was the extent to which the groups viewed the exercise as a race to finish first among the different student groups. “Competition isn’t necessarily bad,” said O’Shea, “but we had to choose whether we should leverage or short-circuit it.” In Gray Anatomy, the team decided on a curriculum with a less linear path. “Gateway characters opened up many other characters that could be engaged in any order,” O’Shea said, “so there was much less chance that students would be able to tell whether they were ahead or behind by looking at other groups’ positions.”
In a related issue, curriculum developers noticed that students in the first version of Alien Contact! were experiencing cognitive overload. “They were rushing through and accomplishing all the required interactions in the 50-minute timeframe, but they really didn’t have time to process the information they received,” said O’Shea. In a revised version of Alien Contact! and in Gray Anatomy, the team capped the number of interactions in each session at six.
Both Dede and O’Shea agreed that curriculum development — not technology — is the key to augmented reality’s potential as a teaching tool. “If you don’t design a sound curriculum, then it doesn’t matter how good the technology is,” O’Shea said. “The novelty will wear off eventually, and you’re back to square one.”
Dede said he tries to avoid thinking about technology “as a solution looking for a problem.”
“I look at problems in education that are persistent and challenging,” he said, “and work my way back to the kinds of pedagogy, content, assessment, teacher professional development, parental input, and other variables involved to see if there might be a way that technology could make a difference.”
DETERMINING AR’S POTENTIAL
To see if AR can make a difference, Dede’s team tested students’ math and language-arts skills before and after they worked with the technology. Students were also tested with an affect survey instrument before and after the exercise, and results were compared with students who participated in a board game version of the AR assignment.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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