Rose Luckin

Sequential art for science and CHI

This paper illustrates our preliminary studies of new interactive tools that support the generation of sequential art for entertainment, learning and scientific discourse. In the first of two examples, primary school students document a practical science session through the creation of a photostory. In the second, participants in a study on the biological nature of thrill create a souvenir photostory by selecting images from a DVD. The paper is written in a comic-book format to further explore and highlight the communicative capabilities of the medium, one that can be visually attractive and facilitate rapid dissemination to a wide audience.

Narrative and interactive learning environments

Learning environments can benefit from drawing on studies of film theory, the practices of the theatre, developments in the games industry, and oral storytelling, as well as theories of narrative. There is a need to tie in work in these areas to educational, cognitive, affective, and social explanations of learning (and their associated empirical results) in order to develop a better understanding of how to design interactive learning environments and a much more theoretically driven understanding of the relationship between the structure of the interaction, the associated emotional value and the quality of learning. The idea for this special issue came from papers presented at the Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments (NILE) 2006 conference. After a call for papers, six papers were accepted for publication – each of which explores issues in the relationship between narrative and interactive learning environments. In the first paper Hazel seeks to construct a rationale for the notion of a ‘‘narrative pedagogy’’. Going back to first principles, he seeks to focus on the complex and profound issue of pedagogy. The paper introduces an issue that may prompt an interesting debate amongst readers around what we understand of the brain’s structure and the extent to which we can know ourselves through its study. We believe that Hazel’s approach may be controversial but that his paper nevertheless makes a useful contribution to the important debate about how narrative can be coupled to the concerns of the pedagogue. A strong theoretical focus is also a characteristic of the second paper by Dolk and den Hertog, who provide an educational approach grounded in experience and data. Based on their extensive experience in the classroom, they describe their approach to helping student teachers learn to observe and interpret learner behaviour. Using a multimedia learning environment, they encourage students to build narratives about the connection between a learner’s behaviour and theory. Their approach involves a six step non-linear process that takes the student teacher from situation observation through generalization to a didactic approach for teacher education. South, Gabbitas and Merrill decided to use a narrative-based approach to teach English to non-native speakers. They found that this improved the contextualisation and motivated the students to learn. They found the assessment of learning gains to be problematic, since standard decontextualised tests were not appropriate for the aim of teaching the use of English in such a way that speakers were sensitive to contextual factors. Patera, Draper, and Naef also provide a context – in their case an imaginary one called the Magic Cottage. In this environment, learners are intended to develop their creative writing. The Magic Cottage is a desktop three-dimensional virtual reality environment which children explore; the environment is designed to stimulate the imagination through graphics, sounds, and interactions. The results, while tentative, lead to the suggestion that Interactive Learning Environments Vol. 16, No. 3, December 2008, 195–197

How Mastery and Performance Goals Influence Learners’ Metacognitive Help-Seeking Behaviours When Using Ecolab II

The Ecolab software is an interactive learning environment for 10–11-year-old learners designed to help children learn about food chains and food webs. In the current chapter, we discuss the results of our recent work on achievement goal orientation and help seeking within the Ecolab environment. We situate these results within the broader landscape of our previous studies and discuss the evolutionary approach we have adopted to develop a methodology to support the design of metacognitive learning tools. This methodology has been built up over a series of empirical studies with the Ecolab software that have demonstrated that children who achieved above average learning gains use a high level of system help. In the empirical work that we focus upon in this chapter, we investigate the relationships between young learners’ metacognition: specifically their help-seeking behaviour and their achievement goal orientations. This work draws together and extends two strands of our previous research: metacognitive software scaffolding (Luckin and Hammerton. Getting to know me: Helping learners understand their own learning needs through metacognitive scaffolding. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2002) and the influence of goal orientation on children’s learning (Harris, Yuill, & Luckin. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3):355–374, 2008). Our research with Ecolab shows how tracking metacognitive behaviours—choice and use of more or less specific help—in the light of children’s goal orientations, can be used to support learning.

Exploring the interplay between human and machine annotated multimodal learning analytics in hands-on STEM activities

This poster explores how to develop a working framework for STEM education that uses both human annotated and machine data across a purpose-built learning environment. Our dual approach is to develop a robust framework for analysis and investigate how to design a learning analytics system to support hands-on engineering design tasks. Data from the first user tests are presented along with the framework for discussion.

The Significance of Context for the Emergence and Implementation of Research Evidence: The Case of Collaborative Problem-Solving.

Abstract One of the fundamental purposes of educational research is to provide evidence to facilitate effective practice. However, the evidence itself does not have much value for practitioners unless key information about the context from which the evidence was generated is also provided. In this paper, we use the word ‘context’ to refer to factors that are relevant for learning, including the interactions that learners experience with multiple people, artefacts, and environments. Unfortunately, in many educational research studies, either these factors do not get the required attention or information about them is presented in an incoherent structure. The resultant lack of information leads to two significant drawbacks. First, it creates confusion among practitioners who want to apply research evidence in their practice. Second, it leads to research studies that on the face of it are similar, but that in reality have resulted from evidence that has been collected in significantly different contexts being included under the same categories in reviews, meta-reviews, and best-evidence syntheses. In this paper, we draw on the concept of ‘relatability’ of evidence and present taxonomy for collaborative problem-solving (CPS) that can be used to provide the valuable information against which research evidence can be indexed. By addressing the need for more detailed information about the contextual factors from which the evidence is generated to bridge the gap between research and practice in CPS research, we aim to exemplify the approach that is needed in educational research more generally.

Sharing teacher knowledge at scale: teacher inquiry, learning design and the representation of teachers’ practice

Abstract Sharing teachers’ professional knowledge remains challenging. Teachers’ development often remains ad hoc or local, and attempts to scale this up have proved problematic. To address this, research in areas such as ‘learning design’ has explored the use of formal representations of practice. This proposes that educational practice can be improved by documenting, sharing and building on what teachers already do. Whilst this has led to some successes, it has not resulted in the widespread transformation of practice. This paper reviews the literature about sharing teacher knowledge. The challenges of scaling up development are then considered in relation to two theories that help explain the challenges: Communities of Practice and Sociomateriality. This analysis is illustrated through case studies in Norway and the UK. These show that teachers already create and share artefacts that represent their pedagogic knowledge. However, they found formal representations, such as learning designs, difficult to work with. The paper concludes that scaling up teacher development using abstract formalisms is unlikely to succeed. Instead, teachers value stories and the materials they already create in their day-to-day practice. It is this intermediate level of representation, between direct experience and formal abstraction, that offers the most promise for sharing practice.