Background
An understanding of complex causality is a necessary foundational skill for advanced science and mathematics. Ecosystems science, an important strand of the life science content standards, requires an understanding of complex causal relationships. However, even after instruction, students often retain inaccurate interpretations about ecosystems’ structural patterns and systemic causality. To address this issue, we are developing a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)-based ecosystems science curriculum called EcoMUVE, based on middle school life science standards.
EcoMUVE includes two ecosystems science curricular modules that together will take approximately ten 50-minute class periods to implement. These will include two MUVEs for teaching various aspects of ecosystems science, with full technical documentation, ancillary materials, and teacher guide and training. These MUVE modules are to complement and extend the current curriculum of the Understandings of Consequence Project.
Research Design and Methods
EcoMUVE is being developed using an iterative design process informed by consultation with an advisory panel of ecosystems scientists and a team of teachers. In year one, we developed an overview of the curriculum design and a prototype of the first module. In year two, we employed a design-based research methodology to conduct a series of evaluation pilots, and to revise the materials based on our findings. In year three, beginning July, 2010, we will finalize development of both modules and the associated curriculum, and conduct rigorous reliability tests of the materials in at least ten classrooms. We will investigate factors that lead successful implementation among teachers and students, and examine student learning. Research data collected include classroom observations, student and teacher surveys and interviews, log files, and student artifacts.
Difficulties in Understanding Ecosystem Concepts
Many ecosystems concepts require students to reason about complex causal patterns that do not fit with their default assumptions about that nature of causality. For the past ten years, The Understandings of Consequence Project has been studying how students reason about ecosystems concepts and the embedded causal patterns.
When reasoning about ecosystems concepts, students tend to:
- make direct, linear connections.
- confuse cyclic nature of matter recycling with the domino-like pattern of energy transfer.
- focus on individuals, not populations.
- miss non-obvious causes of decay.
- think in terms of active agents, not energy transfer.
- miss causes and events that are separated in space and time.
The Understandings of Consequence Project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. ESI-0455664 to Tina Grotzer with earlier NSF support (REC-9725502, REC-0106988 to Tina Grotzer and David Perkins.)
Multi-User Virtual Environments
A MUVE is an immersive simulated world, in which each student has a virtual avatar and moves through a world that models a real-world setting, interacting with other students and with computer-based agents. MUVEs allow simulated experiences otherwise impossible in school settings.
Specific affordances of MUVEs for helping students learn various aspects of causality:
- MUVEs can slow down or speed up time.
- MUVEs can zoom in or out to display phenomena at various scales.
- MUVEs can help students understand spatially distributed phenomena by enabling movement through space.
- Students can collect data by placing simulated measuring tools into an virtual environment.
- MUVEs can support microworld simulations in which students can make predictions, then change a variable or rule and observe what happens.
Other MUVEs from Harvard Graduate School of Education include River City and Virtual Performance Assessments.