Relating Narrative, Inquiry, and Inscriptions: Supporting Consequential Play

By Sasha A. Barab, Troy D. Sadler, Conan Heiselt, Daniel Thomas Hickey, Steven Zuiker. 2007

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, Quest Atlantis, to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment gaming engine to establish a virtual world through which students learned about science inquiry, water quality concepts, and the challenges in balancing scientific and socio-economic factors. Overall, students were clearly engaged, participated in rich scientific discourse, submitted quality work, and learned science content. Further, through participation in this narrative, students developed a rich perceptual, conceptual, and ethical understanding of science. This study suggests that multi-user virtual worlds can be effectively leveraged to support academic content learning.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89ac01db56a6bf64e8f8dc059e185ac3925d0252

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Affordances and Limitations of Immersive Participatory Augmented Reality Simulations for Teaching and Learning (2009, background): “Researchers are exploring the affordances of such models for learning in K-12 education (Clarke et al. 2006; Barab et al. 2007; Neulight et al. 2007).”
Learning science content through socio-scientific issues-based instruction: a multi-level assessment study (2016, background): “Barab et al. (2007) and Sadler, Klosterman, and Topcu (2011) also studied student learning in the context of SSI-based units and documented learning gains.”
Preservice Science Teachers’ Informal Reasoning about Socioscientific Issues: The influence of issue context (2010, background): “SSI usually involve cutting‐edge aspects of science (Kolsto, 2001a ) and are informed by scientific data, but they also relate to and are impacted by social factors such as economic, political, legal, or religious concerns (Barab, Sadler, Heiselt, Hickey, & Zuiker, 2007 ).”
Educational virtual environments: A ten-year review of empirical research (1999-2009) (2011, background): “Large scales of size are used in environments like astronomy (Barab et al., 2000; Barnett et al., 2005; Keating et al., 2002), while small size scales are mainly used in environments of the microcosm such as the study of laser physics (Mikropoulos & Bellou, 2006) or biology (Shim et al., 2003). Tran”
A Qualitative Meta-Analysis of Computer Games as Learning Tools (2009, background): “For example, Barab et al. (2007) evaluated the effects of a massive multiplayer online game on 28 fourth graders with both quantitative pre- and post-tests and qualitative in-field observation.”