Modeling Cyber-Enabled Learning and Teaching: Addressing Methodological and Measurement Issues

Virginia
Synthesis
Science
Middle
Secondary
School Personnel
Principal Investigator: 
Anthony Kelly
Co-Investigator: 
Brenda Bannan-Ritland
Project Overview
Background & Purpose: 

This project addresses the methodological challenges in defining and assessing “cyberinfrastructure” in education. The year-long project will focus on questions such as: what does it mean to study analytical reasoning for geoscience within a networked, cyberinfrastructure framework, occurring across a team of scientists and students in an emergent, and time-variant fashion? What are the methodological challenges in modeling and assessing learning within a cyberinfrastructure project?

Setting: 

This project involves input from an interdisciplinary expert team involved in high-level advisory meetings, data-gathering and analyses to improve understanding of cyberinfrastructure for educational purposes.

Research Design: 

This is a synthesis research project that draws together findings and insights across studies and lines of inquiry related to various educational assessment methods, technology-supported learning environments and existing scientific collaboratories to codify new insights into cyber-enabled learning and assessment. We have organized an interdisciplinary mixed methods team to formulate the research methods strand. A major contribution of this project will be the exploration and documentation of methods and methodology that are likely to capture the complex, multi-level (e.g., Wilensky, & Resnick, 1999; Wilensky, & Shapiro, 2003) nature of learning in a collaboratory.

The following guiding research questions will be posed as guides to the panels:

  1. What are the argumentative, evidentiary and analytic reasoning forms that take place in a networked, cyberinfrastructure framework among geoscientists and their students?
  2. How are these analytic reasoning forms supported in a social, complex, and technologically-rich scientific context?
  3. What are the many ways that learning in a geoscience collaboratory could be measured?
  4. What might serve as appropriate research and assessment methods or evidence for learning in a collaborative, networked, geoscience collaboratory ?
Findings: 

To date, this project has not yet generated findings.

Publications & Presentations: 

There are no project publications at this time.

Other Products: 

There are no project products at this time but a publishable report will be produced at the conclusion of the project.