Teaching Practices with Multiplayer Mixed Reality Simulations and Virtual Students

This project aims to serve the national interest by preparing future secondary mathematics and science teachers to employ effective teaching practices. This IUSE Engaged Student Learning Level 2 project will advance preservice teacher education by addressing two issues: (a) the difficulty in allowing for an accessible and scalable practicum experience for preservice mathematics and science teachers, and (b) the lack of interdisciplinary experiences in teacher preparation programs.

This project will develop and implement a virtual environment for teaching practices that will support collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching practices for mathematics and science preservice teachers. This accessible virtual tool has potential to serve as an innovative method for customizing, promoting, and testing a simulated classroom setup and use of virtual students as part of instructional planning.

Project activities, including the use of technology to model realistic teaching experiences, will prepare future mathematics and science teachers for effective and adaptive teaching practices. The digital teaching simulations will address a limitation of conventional classroom simulations by allowing preservice teachers to engage in realistic classroom events without physically being in a K-12 classroom.

The goal of this project is to develop and study an open-source, multiplayer simulation-based learning platform for preservice secondary mathematics and science teachers. This enactive virtual environment for teaching practice (EVETeach) leverages the perspectives of reflective practice and topic-specific professional knowledge, mixed-reality simulations and virtual agent design, and real-time performance data mining.

EVETeach will engage preservice teachers in planning, conducting, and debriefing on core teaching practices in an assembly of 3D-immersive teaching simulations, and enable them to experience interdisciplinary collaboration in co-teaching and co-designing crosscutting math-science instruction, with a focus on learner autonomy and agency, culturally responsive teaching, and real-time performance tracking. Through a mixed-method, design-based research approach, this 3-year project will encompass iterative design experiments to study and refine the intervention program in situ, and an evaluation study of the intervention's impact on the development of professional knowledge of preservice teachers and their conceptualization of interdisciplinary STEM education.

The project will generate a new design framework governing an effective, accessible, and sustainable learning system that activates, assesses, and adaptively supports the practice-oriented professional knowledge development of future STEM teachers. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship (Noyce) Program is providing co-funding for this project to support the project's preservice teacher preparation goals, which are well-aligned with Noyce Program goals.

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.