Jody Clarke

A Multi-User Virtual Environment for Building and Assessing Higher Order Inquiry Skills in Science.

This study investigated novel pedagogies for helping teachers infuse inquiry into a standards-based science curriculum. Using a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) as a pedagogical vehicle, teams of middle-school students collaboratively solved problems around disease in a virtual town called River City. The students interacted with ‘avatars’ of other students, digital artefacts and computer-based ‘agents’ acting as mentors and colleagues in a virtual community of practice set during the time period when bacteria were just being discovered. This paper describes the results from three implementations of the River City virtual environment in 2004–05 with approximately 2000 students from geographically diverse urban areas. The results indicated that students were able to conduct inquiry in virtual worlds and were motivated by that process. However, the results from the assessments varied depending on the assessment strategy employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Development of River City, a Multi-User Virtual Environment-based Scientific Inquiry Curriculum: Historical and Design Evolutions

This chapter details the 8-year development of River City from the initial design through its current large-scale version. Throughout the project’s history, we employed a design-based research (DBR) approach to the iterative, formative development of the MUVE-based inquiry curriculum, with a current focus on resolving scalability issues inherent in large-scale implementations. In this chapter, we reflect on the evolution of our design-based methodology and discuss what we have learned about designing for inquiry using DBR through several cycles of implementations. We also present an overview of the affective and learning outcomes of the nearly 15,000 students and 100 teachers that have learned from River City. By reflecting explicitly on the evolution of our design strategy, we hope to provide a guide to others interested in design-based research for the use of MUVEs to facilitate scientific inquiry in the K-12 classroom.

MUVEs as a powerful means to study situated learning

This paper describes how multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) can simulate immersive, collaborative learning environments intermediate in complexity between recipe-like lab exercises and real world inquiry situations. We offer the River City MUVE as a case study that illustrates how rich logfiles provide scholars and teachers with detailed data to understand learning processes, to diagnose suboptimal patterns of student performance, and to assess the knowledge and skills students have mastered. This aids curriculum design and theory.