Virtual Learning Environments: Unveiling Learning and Identity

This book provides education scholars insight into current theoretical and methodological approaches to conceptualize, facilitate, and examine learning and identity in virtual learning environments such as games and simulations. Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are being increasingly designed, implemented, and researched because they offer opportunities for learning that are embodied, enactive (i.e., learning by doing), extended into the learners’ environment, and embedded in authentic and potentially valuable contexts for identity exploration. Each chapter in this book uniquely illustrates the learning and identity processes, characteristics, and outcomes that VLEs can facilitate. Together, these approaches provide a foundation for use-inspired research that guides how individuals intentionally, continually, and dynamically reinvent the self for a future that requires flexibility and adaptability in both career and academic spaces. The volume will be a key resource for researchers, scholars, and practitioners engaged in the interdisciplinary fields of learning sciences, learning analytics, and learning design. It was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Education.

Table of Contents:
Citation Information Notes on Contributors Introduction: Framing and Studying Learning and Identity in Virtual Learning Environments Aroutis Foster and Mamta Shah PART I. Learning, Instruction, and Cognition 1. Influences of Game Design and Context on Learners’ Trying on Moral Identities Spencer P. Greenhalgh 2. Assessing Science Identity Exploration in Immersive Virtual Environments: A Mixed Methods Approach Joseph M. Reilly, Eileen McGivney, Chris Dede and Tina Grotzer 3. Spaces of Rebellion: the Use of Multi-user Virtual Environments in the Development of Learner Epistemic Identity Michael Glassman, Irina Kuznetcova, Tzu-Jung Lin, Shantanu Tilak, Qiannan Wang and Amanda Walling 4. Successful Learning Environments Support and Harness Students’ Identity-based Motivation: A Primer Daphna Oyserman and Andrew Dawson PART II. Motivation and Social Processes 5. Context, Community, and the Individual: Modeling Identity in a Game Affinity Space Amanda Barany and Aroutis Foster PART III. Measurement, Statistics, and Research Design 6. Facilitating and Interpreting High School Students’ Identity Exploration Trajectories in STEM Mamta Shah, Aroutis Foster, Hamideh Talafian, Amanda Barany and Mark E. Petrovich Jr. PART IV. Commentary on Virtual Learning Environments: Unveiling Learning and Identity 7. Operationalizing Identity – Studying Changing Selves in Experimental Learning Environments David Williamson Shaffer Index