Role of Facilitation in Enhancing Young Children’s Learning within an MR Environment

• In Event: Empowering Young Learners: Enhancing Child Agency Through Educator-Facilitated Digital Exploration

Abstract

Background: Over the past two decades, research has focused on using Mixed Reality (MR) to help young learners understand complex systems (Danish et al., 2020; Tu et al., 2023). In MR environments, children often need support to connect digital representations with real-world scientific phenomena (Enyedy et al., 2012). Educators’ facilitation is crucial in enhancing children's use of new technology in classrooms (Guha et al., 2005; Sharma & Hannafin, 2007). Teachers help children grasp challenging concepts and develop science literacy (Hsin, 2014). Based on these insights, we aim to explore: How do facilitators' prompts within a Mixed Reality environment enhance young children's understanding of scientific mechanisms?
Method: Activities were designed to engage students with the GEM-STEP MR technology (Danish et al., 2022). This technology tracks students’ movements and translates them into the movements of a bee character on a shared screen in front of the classroom. The curriculum consisted of six sessions, each lasting approximately 40 minutes. The participants were 16 first and second-grade students in the Midwestern U.S. All classroom activities were videotaped. We began by content-coding various types of facilitation and students’ responses related to the components and mechanisms of the honeybee system. After completing the content analysis, we selected representative video clips where facilitators used a combination of prompts to aid students' understanding. We applied Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to examine how students developed their skills in utilizing multiple forms of representation to understand the honeybee system in GEM-STEP.

Findings: We analyzed the correlation between facilitators’ prompts and students’ reasoning about mechanisms. The findings underscore the critical role facilitators play in enhancing young children’s learning in the STEP program. For instance, facilitators might describe students’ movements in the MR environment to help them relate to real-world bee activities. They use “what” questions like “What have you seen?” to direct students' attention to the digital representation, prompting students to describe the activities and entities they observe. Facilitators also employ “why” questions, such as “Any idea why that happened?” to encourage students to think about the underlying mechanisms. These follow-up questions led to more detailed and interconnected responses from the students. Through interaction analysis, we identified segments where facilitators used prompts to help students identify digital representations in STEP and then explain the mechanisms of the honeybee system. In the video clips, facilitators first mentioned events in GEM-STEP and asked students to describe the phenomena. They then encouraged students to reflect on the causes and mechanisms behind these events. As a result, with the help of prompts, students were able to use their bodies to explain the mechanisms of the targeted science concepts.
Scholarly Significance: This research highlights the crucial role of facilitators in guiding young children’s learning in MR environments. By using prompts to enhance understanding and reasoning about scientific mechanisms, facilitators can significantly enrich educational practices and technology integration in early education. This study provides valuable insights into effective teaching strategies that leverage MR to support young learners, contributing to the advancement of educational technology and pedagogy.

Authors

• Xintian Tina Tu-Shea, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Chaoran Wang, Colby College