Learning from avatars: Learning assistants practice physics pedagogy in a classroom simulator

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Preparing and Supporting University Physics Educators.] Undergraduate students are increasingly being used to support course transformations that incorporate research-based instructional strategies. While such students are typically selected based on strong content knowledge and possible interest in teaching, they often do not have previous pedagogical training. The current training models make use of real students or classmates role playing as students as the test subjects. We present a new environment for facilitating the practice of physics pedagogy skills, a highly immersive mixed-reality classroom simulator, and assess its effectiveness for undergraduate physics learning assistants (LAs). LAs prepared, taught, and reflected on a lesson about motion graphs for five highly interactive computer generated student avatars in the mixed-reality classroom simulator. To assess the effectiveness of the simulator for this population, we analyzed the pedagogical skills LAs intended to practice and exhibited during their lessons and explored LAs’ descriptions of their experiences with the simulator. Our results indicate that the classroom simulator created a safe, effective environment for LAs to practice a variety of skills, such as questioning styles and wait time. Additionally, our analysis revealed areas for improvement in our preparation of LAs and use of the simulator. We conclude with a summary of research questions this environment could facilitate.

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Figure 1

The TeachLivE Simulator. (a) The high school simulator classroom and avatars. (b) The participants’ view (with the middle school classroom shown on screen). Participants stood in front of the television screen, and their motions were tracked by Kinect and mimicked in the provided view.

Figure 2

Time line and details of the physics mixed-reality simulation activity. The LAs’ experience was based on the Action Review Cycle, and included planning what to practice in the simulation, two rounds of practice separated by group reflection, and a final written reflection.

Figure 3

Pedagogical skill use by LA-3C. This LA increased his use of open questions in the second round of teaching the student-avatars. The transcripts for these interactions are available in the Supplemental Material. Codes are as follows: $\text{Eli}=\text{Elicit}$ Prior Knowledge; $\text{OpQ}=\text{Open}$ Question; $\text{ClQ}=\text{Closed}$ Question; $\text{LdQ}=\text{Leading}$ Question; $\mathrm{RWE}=\text{Real}$ World Example; $\text{WGp}=\text{Whole}$ Group Involvement; $\text{Upt}=\text{Uptake}$; $\mathrm{WT}=\text{Wait}$ Time.

Figure 4

Pedagogical skill use by LA-3A. This LA decreased his use of open questions, while increasing his use of wait time. The transcripts for these interactions are available in the Supplemental Material [51].

Figure 5

Observed pedagogical skills. We observed LAs practicing the full range of identified pedagogical skills in the classroom simulator.