- Xu Wang, Meredith M. Thompson, K. Yang, Dwaipayan Roy, K. Koedinger, C. Rosé, J. Reich. 2020. Practice-Based Teacher Education With ELK: A Role-Playing Simulation for Eliciting Learner Knowledge. Abstract: Compared to other helping professions, teacher training typically lacks sufficient opportunities for novices to practice new skills. When teachers learn, they listen to people talk about teaching, or talk about teaching themselves, but they very rarely do the work of teaching. Games and simulations offer a promising framework to advance practice-based professional training for complex skills such as teaching. In this work, we built a role-playing simulation ELK to help teachers develop effective questioning strategies to elicit learner prior knowledge. We evaluate ELK with 76 pre-service teachers in two modes, one is more akin to the kind of human-human interaction that is germane to teaching but requires more human resources and one that can be done independently. We find that in both cases ELK raises awareness about student misconceptions and the importance of student thinking, and teachers demonstrate a modest increase in effective questioning strategies after three rounds of playing.
