COLLEGE PARK, MD (December, 2014) A paper co-authored by Associate Professor Diane Jass Ketelhut of the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership about results from the SAVE Science study, entitled “Basketball Trouble: A Game-Based Assessment of Science Inquiry and Content Knowledge,” was featured at the Association of Educational Communications and Technology's international conference held this November in Jacksonville, Florida. AECT chooses only one feature presentation each year for this four-day conference.
SAVE Science is an NSF-funded study that investigates the use of immersive virtual worlds for assessing science learning with a more accurate reflection of scientific complexity than current tests allow. The research team has developed four game-based assessment modules to elicit what middle school students have learned in the classroom, specifically targeting standards that fare poorly on district and state assessments. These modules assess understanding of structure-function relationships, weather fronts, gas laws, and force and motion.
The "Basketball Trouble" module assesses knowledge of gas laws and related properties, as well as such aspects of scientific inquiry as evidence-based hypothesis formation. The story places students in the middle of a city during a snowy winter. They are asked to help the manager of a local basketball tournament find out why basketballs are not bouncing well on an outdoor court, while identically inflated balls bounce well indoors at the local gymnasium.
As students work on a SAVE Science module, they seek to uncover the likely contributors to a problem facing a virtual community. They interact with characters and objects, collect and analyze clues, and use their understanding of both content and scientific inquiry to draw inferences. They can solve the problems in multiple ways.
While students interact with the virtual world, their activities are recorded in a database with locations and time-stamps, allowing the researchers to analyze both answers to questions posed by characters and the processes that brought students to those answers. In this way, the researchers can investigate aspects of the assessment such as design heuristics and the validation of in-world actions as indicators of understanding. In the paper featured at the AECT conference, Dr. Ketelhut's team analyzed the design of "Basketball Trouble" to detect varying levels of learning based on in-game performance. The paper describes methods and results of data-mining analyses focused on evaluating the module's validity for predicting student understanding of gas laws and for visualizing patterns of student interactions.
Nearly two thousand middle school children, aged 11 to 14, and 17 teachers across the United States have participated in SAVE Science since 2009.
Dr. Diane Jass Ketelhut is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership. She holds certification in secondary school science and was a curriculum specialist and teacher of mathematics and science in grades 5-12 for fifteen years. She earned her Ed.D. in Learning and Teaching from Harvard University.
Click here to read more about SAVE Science in the fall 2014 issue of Endeavors (p. 8-9, "Where No One Has Gone Before: COE and iSchool Faculty Create Virtual Frontiers for STEM Education").
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