Restricted Research - Award List, Note/Discussion Page
Fiscal Year: 2023
166 University of North Texas (142054)
Principal Investigator: Hayes,Aleshia T
Total Amount of Contract, Award, or Gift (Annual before 2011): $ 90,532
Exceeds $250,000 (Is it flagged?): No
Start and End Dates: 9/1/22 - 8/31/23
Restricted Research: YES
Academic Discipline: Learning Technologies
Department, Center, School, or Institute: College of Information
Title of Contract, Award, or Gift: EAGER: A Training Tool to Help Teachers Recognize and Reduce Bias in Their Classroom Behaviors and Increase Interpersonal Competence
Name of Granting or Contracting Agency/Entity:
Cornell University
CFDA Link: NSF
47.070
Program Title:
none
CFDA Linked: Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Note:
Biased teaching harms individual students and the classroom climate, during lessons, assessment and the classroom discipline. Students are aware of teacher bias, especially as expressed through nonverbal behaviors, and it hurts their ability to engage in the classroom and thus learn. Rapport is key in teaching, and teachers need to learn how to create rapport with all students equitably. Many interventions aim to address teachers? emotional states, for example, by promoting feelings of empathy toward students, but this approach assumes that skills will follow empathy. It also does not account for the fact that individual differences may affect teachers? abilities to engender rapport with students in the classroom. Some existing simulations and mixed reality proffer the ability for teachers to practice effective nonverbal behaviors, but they lack the granularity to track teacher behavior and focus on tailoring the behavior of the simulated students to increase efficacy in practice. VR offers a new way for teachers to observe, modulate, and reflect on their own nonverbal behavior in relation to others. As has been documented by a rush of recent publications, many instructors turned to VR as a teaching tool during the pandemic (Won, Bailey & Yi, 2020); using virtual environments to teach a diverse range of topics ranging from clinical anatomy, food technology, landscape architecture, automotive engineering, and Chinese language learning. Our intervention will train teachers to identify their nonverbal behaviors key to effective teaching and teach them to recognize biased behavior and adapt to individual students interpersonal communication style.
Discussion: No discussion notes