Studying Robust-Design Strategies for Developing Innovations Effective and Scalable in Challenging Classroom Settings
This project studied the extent to which The River City MUVE, a technology-based curricular innovation, developed through "robust-design" strategies was effective in increasing educational outcomes for students across a range of challenging classroom settings. Evolving an intervention for extreme scalability - even into contexts in which some of its conditions for success were attenuated or lacking - required "ruggedizing" its efficacy when parts of its intended enactment were absent.
Developing an innovation capable of adaptation into most school sites involved designing interventions that retained 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) were missing or attenuated. Under these circumstances, major intended aspects of an innovation's design are not 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 was important. This project assessed 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.
The River City team has also explored the use of data mining techniques to harvest information from the data beyond the articulated research questions of the study. Through funding from the National Science Foundation, this work culminated in the development of the Avatar Log Visualizer (AVL) which helped to visualize event logs in River City.
The Avatar Log Visualizer (AVL) generated a series of slides that depicted the relative frequency of events for one or more subpopulations of students, aggregated by user-specified location and time bins, by projecting colors of varying intensity on a geographic map of the world. (The image to the left compares the frequency of events for two subpopulations, represented by orange and blue, in a certain session in River City.) The application was written in Java for cross-platform support and data was stored in a MySQL database. AVL was able to run from the command-line, to support automated generation of visualizations, or through a simple interface, which provided album and slideshow capabilities for image view.