Current Research Endeavors

Studying Robust-Design Strategies for Developing Innovations Effective and Scalable in Challenging Classroom Settings

This project is studying the extent to which The River City MUVE, a technology-based curricular innovation, developed through "robust-design" strategies is effective in increasing students' educational outcomes across a range of challenging classroom settings. Evolving an intervention for extreme scalability - even into contexts in which some of its conditions for success are attenuated or lacking - requires "ruggedizing" its efficacy when parts of its intended enactment are absent.

Developing an innovation capable of adaptation into most school sites involves designing interventions that retain a substantial proportion of their effectiveness despite relatively barren settings, such as many urban districts, in which some of the innovation's important conditions for success (e.g., a supportive administration, qualified and enthusiastic teachers, a well maintained technology infrastructure) are missing or attenuated. Under these circumstances, major intended aspects of an innovation's design will not be enacted as intended by its developers, so evolving robust-design strategies and studying the efficacy under inhospitable conditions of interventions produced using these ruggedized strategies is important. This project will assess such a strategy for extreme scalability through design-based research on large-scale implementations of a multi-user virtual environment curriculum across a spectrum of contexts.

Prior Research

• Museum-Related Multimedia and Virtual Environments for Teaching and Learning Science » NSF Grants 9980464, 0296001, 0202543
• Studying Situated Learning and Knowledge Transfer in a Multi-User Virtual Environment » NSF Grant 0310188