Studying Situated Learning in a Multiuser Virtual Environment

Multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) enable multiple simultaneous participants to access virtual contexts, interact with digital artifacts and tools, represent themselves through avatars, communicate with other participants and with agents, and enact collaborative learning activities of various types. This chapter describes multiple ways in which the detailed record of student actions and utterances automatically collected in MUVEs offers great potential for assessment, both from a research perspective and in terms of formative, diagnostic information that could help tailor instruction to individual needs. In River City, students work in teams to develop hypotheses regarding one of three strands of illness in town. These three disease strands are integrated with historical, social, and geographical content, allowing students to experience the inquiry skills involved in disentangling multicausal problems embedded within a complex environment. The individualized guidance system (IGS) offers reflective prompts about each student’s learning in world, with the content of the messages based on in-world events and basic event histories of that individual.