Pre-service Educators Reimagining Core Experiences in Physics Teaching

The need to prepare a skilled and motivated STEM workforce who can meet the demands of a dynamic and complex global economy is a widely recognized national challenge. This project, a cross-institutional collaboration among North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Davidson College, capitalizes on advances in technology to respond to that challenge. It aims to provide empirical evidence on the enhancement of foundational physics concepts of pre-service elementary school teacher candidates, key players in the development of the STEM professional workforce, using haptically-enabled science simulations (HESSs). Haptics is an umbrella term for the sense of touch (in this case virtual touch). The HESSs are virtual representations of real-world systems, displayed visually, and augmented with haptic force-feedback. Users can physically interact with multiple (often invisible) components of the modeled system (in this case) forces. The project team's underlying premise is that if soon-to-be teachers (re)learn core physics concepts more deeply, they will be empowered to provide richer learning opportunities for their students. This project will provide pre-service elementary school teachers access to ideas (in physics) and tools (technological and pedagogical) with the potential to influence how they approach the teaching of basic physics concepts in the elementary grades, as their students are just entering the STEM pipeline.

This project targets two intertwined focal areas of the EHR Core Research (ECR) program: STEM workforce development and STEM learning and learning environments. Building upon prior work involving HESSs, this project will work with undergraduate pre-service elementary school teachers to examine implications for the use of HESSs during their preparation. The project team will investigate pre-service elementary school teachers' understandings of forces as interactions (a foundational concept in physics) and the influence of haptic force-feedback technology. The project adopts an embodied cognition perspective in the design, building, and testing of its intervention. It uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the interfaces between teaching and learning and the mediation of STEM learning through fundamental use-inspired research. The design, develop, and testing research cycle will include focus groups, usability testing, and small-scale pilot testing. The pilot testing will use a pretest-posttest control group design with random assignment into two groups, haptic vs. non-haptic simulations. This research has the potential to provide foundational knowledge for a new model of teaching about core physics concepts in the form of HESSs. Project goals are to (1) add foundational human-computer interaction knowledge to guide the design, development, and testing of HESSs, (2) isolate and document the haptic influences on the development of teachers' specialized content knowledge of forces as interactions, and (3) study the pedagogical impact of the HESSs on pre-service elementary school teachers. In addition to the benefits to the pre-service elementary teachers who participate, this project will train graduate research assistants and involve undergraduate students in cutting-edge STEM research, which also has the potential to contribute to STEM workforce development. Project findings will be used to develop a set of design guidelines for the haptic-augmentation of science simulations that can be used by other researchers. Moreover, cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary partnerships, such as this project, may enhance the infrastructure for STEM education and research. This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports fundamental research in STEM education.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.