Project Activities
Researchers will develop an experimental platform modeled after the Flatland novella that will facilitate data collection from students, situate experimental tasks in an engaging narrative story, and allow for the researcher to control key experimental variables. The overarching research questions that will be explored via this platform are (1) How do different modalities for collaborative embodiment, particularly shared AR, impact student understanding of geometric principles? And (2) how are these effects mediated by gesture, language, and actions, and how are they moderated by student and task characteristics?
Structured Abstract
Setting
This research will take place in high schools in Texas and Wisconsin and in a university in Wisconsin.
Sample
This research will sample urban high school students enrolled in a college access program in Texas where the majority of students are racial/ethnic minorities, high school students in an urban Title I Wisconsin school where the majority of students are economically disadvantaged and the plurality are racial/ethnic minorities, and college students in Wisconsin. Study 1 will involve 160 undergraduate students from Wisconsin, Studies 2 and 3 will involve 190 high school students from Texas, and Study 4 will involve 9 intact high school geometry classes in Wisconsin and Texas.
In Studies 1, 2, and 4, researchers will examine how different modalities (e.g., AR, DGS,manipulatives) impact student outcomes, as mediated by students' use of action, language, and gesture, and moderated by student and, in Study 2, by task characteristics, too. In Study 3, the team will also look at how different collaborative configurations (e.g., individual work versus parallel collaboration versus joint collaboration) impact their mediators and student outcomes.
Research design and methods
Students will be assigned to different conditions individually or in pairs using a randomized block design. In Study 1, the research team will compare DGS use to no materials and working individually to. collaborative learning. In Study 2, researchers will compare shared AR to a DGS, for tasks involving both 2D and 3D shapes. In Study 3, they will compare three different configurations of collaboration in shared AR (parallel, observer, joint). In Study 4, the team will assign pairs of students to 4 conditions in a 2 by 2 design that contrasts dynamic (DGS, shared AR) with non-dynamic modalities (paper/pencil, manipulatives), and 3D (shared AR, manipulatives) with 2D modalities (DGS, paper/pencil).
Control condition
In Study 1, the control will be a condition where students receive no materials. In Study 2, the control condition will be a DGS. In Study 3, the control is a parallel collaboration condition. In Study 4, the control is a pencil-and-paper condition.
Key measures
The key outcome is whether students successfully formulate intuitions, insight, and proofs for geometric conjectures. Key mediators include whether students use different kinds of gestures, actions, and speech categories. Key moderators include geometry pretest score and spatial test score.
Data analytic strategy
Researchers will fit mixed effects logistic regression models predicting student outcomes (intuition, insight, proof), with conjecture and participant as random effects. Experimental condition will be a fixed effect, and the team will look at the interaction of condition with moderators. In addition, the project team will conduct causal mediation analyses using gesture, speech, and action variables.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
The research team will generate information about the malleable factors, mediators, and moderators associated with collaborative embodiment in the domain of geometric reasoning. They will share their results via conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications.
Publications:
ERIC Citations: Publications from this project available in ERIC are here.
Journal articles
Huang, W., Walkington, C., & Nathan, M. J. (2023). Coordinating modalities of mathematical collaboration in shared VR environments. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 18(2), 163-201.
Walkington, C. (2021). Intrinsic integration in learning games and virtual instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69, 157-160.
Walkington, C., Nathan, M. J., Hunnicutt, J., Washington, J., & Zhou, M. (2024). New kinds of embodied interactions that arise in augmented reality dynamic geometry software. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 75, 101175.
Proceedings
Schenck, K. E., Kim, D., Xia, F., Swart, M. I., Walkington, C., & Nathan, M. J. (2024). Exploring an Interactive Technology for Supporting Embodied Geometric Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2024, pp. 131-138. International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Walkington, C., Nathan, M. J., Hunnicutt, J., Washington, J., & Holcomb-Webb, K. (2022). Learning geometry through collaborative, embodied explorations with augmented reality holograms. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2022, pp. 1992-1993. International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Washington, J., Darwin, T., Beauchamp, T., & Walkington, C. (2024). A qualitative comparison of mathematics teachers’ and students’ experiences in a virtual reality algebra application. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2024, pp. 1610-1613. International Society of the Learning Sciences.
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