Educational Technology

Eliciting and interpreting students’ ideas are essential skills in teaching, yet pre-service teachers (PSTs) rarely have adequate opportunities to develop these skills. In this study, we examine PSTs’ patterns of discourse and perceived learning through engaging in an interactive digital simulation called Eliciting Learner Knowledge (ELK). ELK is a seven-minute, chat-based virtual role play between a PST playing a “teacher” and a PST playing a “student” where the goal is for the teacher to find out what the student knows about a topic.

Facilitating discussions is a key approach that science teachers use to engage students in scientific argumentation. However, learning how to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions is an ambitious teaching practice that can be difficult to learn how to do well, especially for preservice teachers (PSTs) who typically have limited opportunities to tryout and refine this teaching practice. This study examines secondary PSTs’ perceptions and engagement with a science performance task—used within an online, simulated classroom consisting of five middle school student avatars—to practice this ambitious teaching practice.

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual.

MindHive is an online, open science, citizen science platform co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, cognitive and social scientists, UX researchers, community organizers, and software developers to support real-world brain and behavior research for (a) high school students and teachers who seek authentic STEM research experiences, (b) neuroscientists and cognitive/social psychologists who seek to address their research questions outside of the lab, and (c) community-based organizations who seek to conduct grassroots, science-based research for policy change.

In this paper, we present an overview of the design research used to develop a digital collaborative environment with an embedded problem-based curriculum. We then discuss the student and teacher features of the environment that promote inquiry-based learning and teaching.

While tragedy has struck an inordinate number of students in the past several years, not all areas of the country are at risk for every natural hazard all the time. To avoid having students feel like Chicken Little under a falling sky, the GeoHazard project uses simulations, data, experimentation, and scientific argumentation to teach about risk and uncertainty. We have created three scaffolded online modules focused on hurricanes, wildfires, and inland flooding to help teach these concepts. Through investigations using both simulations and real-world data, these curriculum units introduce students to the scientific factors responsible for these hazards and provide practice in interpreting forecasts.

Concord Consortium’s new Earth Rocks Map displays a generalized representation of Earth’s geology, focused primarily on the distribution of the three major rock types (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary). What makes this map different is that it strips out information about geologic eras, highlighting the distribution of rocks found on Earth’s surface.

Teachers’ professional noticing has been described as transitioning from descriptions of general pedagogy to analysis of students’ mathematical procedures and conceptual reasoning. Such a shift is described as a transition towards more student-centered noticing. In the present study, we used screen recordings of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) 360 video viewing to examine the relationship between where and what PSTs’ looked at and what they attended to in writing.

Immersive 360 videos are increasingly being used in pre-service teachers (PST) education. There is preliminary evidence that this technology may benefit future educators’ focus and attention to classroom settings and events. However, more analytical efforts are needed to better understand its potential impact on reported focus of attention (RFA) among future educators. This article addresses this gap by presenting the findings of a study on 360 videos that involved 92 PSTs.

This article presents a vision for 2025 to implement low cost and effective extended reality (XR) technologies to supplement teacher education field experiences, regardless of if and when another global or local crisis occurs (e.g., pandemic, war, weather). In doing so, empirical and theoretical research is presented that argues for teacher educators to seek out and employ more immersive representations of practice that take advantage of the perceptual capacity of XR.