Changing How Children Learn with Technologies: A Comparative Case Study Jihyun Lee & Ilju Rha

Changing How Children Learn with Technologies: A Comparative Case Study Jihyun Lee & Ilju Rha (Seoul National University)

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Methodology 3. Result 4. Discussion 5. Conclusion

Introduction • Technology as a powerful tool for education • The mere presence of emerging technologies does not ensure their effective use • A clear organizational understanding on how children should learn with technology within educational reform initiatives is needed • An area that has drawn much less attention than research on other educational technology topics

Introduction • The purposes of this presentation are: To identify sets of attitudes or understanding on how children learn with technology which may help/hinder successful technology implementation, enhanced learning and further educational reform To help inform decisions about the future role of technology in education

System Description – River City • Multi-User Virtual Environments for Exploring Science • River City involves teams of middle school students who are asked to collaboratively solve the health problems of a simulated 19th century • The avatars of the learners themselves populate the city andcommunicate with one another. Through observation and inference, they form and test hypotheses, and deduce evidence-based conclusions about underlying multi-causes

System Description – Enaquest • A 3D MUVE adventure game for English education developed by a Korean publisher • The target learners are elementary school students aged from 8 to 13 • The main character Jack had an invitation from a virtual world where English is spoken. His parents decided to send Jack to the virtual world, Big Balloon City. While he is living in that world, he confronts many situations • In every situation, he gets a quest. If he performs the quest successfully, his level of capability gets higher. If he fails in performing the quest, he loses the capability. The level of game or level of English changes depending on players’ quest performance

Methodology Participants, Data Sources and Analyses • Investigated two learning systems, which have the same technological genre but seem to be based on different understanding of how to improve learning with technology • River City: two public school classrooms in Boston (one sixth and one seventh grade) • Enaquest: groups of the enrolled students aged 8 to 13 of the developer’s company • Qualitative interview/observation data with students, instructional designers and developers of each system were analyzed for emergent themes/questions

Result Emergent Questions • Can technology be equivalent to teachers? • Should it be eye-amusing and high-tech? • Do children always need extrinsic motivation? • Should the learning path be fixed or open? • Can the effectiveness of the technology only be assessed with test scores? • Do developers need formative evaluation and research?

Result • Can technology be equivalent to teachers? [River City] “In the constructive context of learning, it is hard to identify teachers’ role. However, we suggest teachers travel RC as a peer avatar and support their learning processes by providing guidance, asking important questions at particular times, moderating communications in a group, giving tips as necessary, correcting misconceptions, and so on… It (River City) may, in particular, help teachers reach students struggling with motivation, self-worth, and lack of content knowledge…” [Enaquest] “One of successful users of our program did much better on the test this month than last month. The student needs not to go US to learn English. Now, he needs no teacher, no private tutor and only with Enaquest he improved!”

Result • Can technology be equivalent to teachers? [River City] S1: I am here in the City Hospital. Oh, I am stuck on the wall. S2: There is a patients’ admission chart on the table. T: Let’s look into the chart and see who the patients are and why they came to this hospital. S3: Most of them came here because of diarrhea! T: Anybody know the reason of diarrhea? S1: I guess bad food…or bad water…maybe. T: They eat same food? Or same water? S2: Oh, 4 out of 5 came from the same area! Look at their address on the chart. The Tenement street! ----------------------------------------- [Enaquest] Mary (Sys): Hi, I am Mary. Welcome to foreigner’s town. S1: Should I speak in English here (translated from Korean)? Mary: If you help foreigners here, you will get alphabet balls. Here comes a quiz! If you get right on questions, you’ll have more power to help foreigners!

Result 2. Should it be eye-amusing and high-tech? [Enaquest] “We made all the characters and buildings with 3D, which gives the system much neater look. In order to help student be engaged in learning, garden games, mini games and pretty interface are newly added. There are also several pre-programmed non-player characters. They work as trouble makers, entertainer, or guide. Those AI (Artificial Intelligence) characters add more fun to the game. In our next version, we will add more high- tech features such as natural language recognition tool” [River City] “We hide the clues in every corner of the virtual world so that students carefully investigate their environment and find those clues one by one. If an important clue does not draw students’ attention, then teacher should guide their attention to the specific clue.”

Result 3. Do children always need extrinsic motivation? [River City] “What makes RC motivating is that this is a collaborative learning environment. Collaboration can provide diversity in their learning even when they dwell on a common problem. Diverse learners of domain knowledge and diverse cognitive abilities could have different pieces of a mosaic puzzle. We believe those learning processes surely rewarding enough.” [Enaquest] “I am sure of the effectiveness of the combination of game and education. Students, especially, in their age from 8 to 13, definitely need something exciting such as featuresthat StarCraft has. Competition works better than collaboration to achieve learning outcome.”

Result 4. Should the learning path be fixed or open? [River City] “Open environment to maximize the students’ cognitive flexibility makes the learning process in River City more valuable.While they struggle with the unfamiliar environment, find problems, try to solve the problems, they could learn how to learn with others” [Enaquest] “Somewhat fixed path in learning helps student plan strategy for their learning. If it is too open, too many possibilities, students can not be motivated”

Result 5. Can the effectiveness of the technology only be assessed with test scores? [River City] “We found that students discovered multiple intriguing situations in the MUVE to investigate. In our seventh grade classroom, five different hypotheses about these situations emerged… it also seemed to have the most positive effects for students with high perceptions of their own thoughtfulness of inquiry. Another outcome involved students’ perceptions of their teacher’s role in the classroom. By the end of the study, experimental group students perceived their teachers as pressing them less for understanding than at the beginning” [Enaquest] “The best thing about Enaquest is that students look like playing and gaming but their scores on English test get higher. Parents are really happy about it”

Result 6. Do developers need formative evaluative research? [River City] “Research findings typically show substantial influence of contextual variables in shaping the desirability, practicality, and effectiveness of designs” [Enaquest] “We did a Beta test for 2 months and we launched. Of course we are providing technical support. However, if we keep testing our program, it costs a lot. Financially, formative evaluation and further research is not feasible. We wish we could”

Discussion • The biggest difference between two programs was on the role of teachers. Whereas River City has teachers’ place in the system, Enaquest runs without teachers. • Interface factors of the systems were important in both cases but River City concerns the navigation issue and visual clues, and for Enaquest the attractive graphics and high-tech functions are the biggest concern. • River City solely focuses on intrinsic motivation which can be provoked during the interactions with peer students while they perform the task, but Enaquest is based on game scoring with explicit extrinsic rewards. • River City is a truly open environment for learning but Enaquest has pre-determined path to follow with cascaded levels. • River City includes various evaluation criteria such as metacognition skills and affective factors besides the scores on the tests, and Enaquest assesses the effectiveness of its system with test scores and motivation. • Both system value the formative evaluation and research but River City values it more than Enaquest does.

Discussion • These two systems share one technological genre which is multi-user virtual environment but each takes advantage of its affordances differently based on its pedagogical belief on how children learn with technology. • Multi-user virtual environment can uniquely provide optimal communication tool, authentic multidisciplinary tasks, and flexible safe environments to try out students’ idea (Dede, 2002). • Successful MUVE system should account its unique affordances along with cognitive understanding on how people learn (Bransford et al. 2000) • With technology, a certain types of learning processes are easily and optimally implemented in learning but without the technology, it is difficult or even impossible. • If technology works a tool which make impossible things possible and that surely enhances learning, curriculum would be influenced by those technology implementation, and then professional development could be affected by it and then organizational support could be changed accordingly and so on. • Finally, successful technology implementation can give impact on education reform.

Conclusion • Successful technology implementation should show how learning can be leveraged with technology that would be impossible or difficult without technology. • The potential role of technology is not a tool for learning without teachers, not a mere entertainment, not a guide to the pre-determined path, but it should be a crucial component to enhance learning. • Technology should engage the cognitive characteristics of learning as a constructive, collaborative, interactive, contextualized process (Bransford et al., 2000). • Technology has a potential in education reform (Tyack, D. & Cuban, L, 1995)

Thank you!Please feel free to email us for any comments or questions. Jihyun Lee & Ilju Rha leeji1@snu.ac.kr

Changing How Children Learn with Technologies: A Comparative Case Study Jihyun Lee & Ilju Rha