Learning Experiments
Evaluation activities through the engagement of external user groups that consist of stakeholder representatives, namely professionals and language educators, will be organized in the form of learning experiments. Learning experiments will be planned interventions over a significant period of time (1). They will introduce siLang methodologies and tools into instructional settings, or broader and less formal learning settings. The experiments will engage participants in language and communication training activities designed around the siLang language learning game.
The training activities will be based on earlier research in educational process evaluation through teaching experiments that are organized in around “teaching episodes” (1) (2) during which the instructor is an observer who analyses student perceptions, attitudes, and progress. The researcher/ teachers uses the results from a particular teaching episode for the organization of the next evaluation cycle.
siLang engineers and pedagogues will work with language teachers and will pursue interactive communication with professionals and higher education students who will use the siLang tools towards enhancing their communication skills in vehicular languages. Debriefing activities will document experiences of participants upon completion of the each evaluation cycle.
The methodology of learning experiments as chosen as an instrument of evaluation for siLang methodologies and tools for a number of reasons:
- It facilitates participant observation in line with participatory qualitative evaluation approaches that offer advantages when documenting and analyzing evaluation indicators similar to those identified earlier in this report for siLang: perceptions, attitudes, motivation, and engagement
- It facilitates the documentation of challenges faced by users during evaluation activities
- It enables the documentation of modifications on the way students operate as exposure to the proposed virtual, game-based learning tools and situated learning methodologies progresses, in other words as the evaluation activities evolve
- They are in line with constructivist learning methodologies adopted by siLang, namely synthesizing new knowledge based on past experiences and active learning approaches (2)(1)
- It enables an analysis of student behaviour that may shed further light in-to the effectiveness and impact of project outcomes by going beyond what students say and do (2)
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references
1. The siLang Project Management Handbook, on-line at: http://www.si-lang.net/images/documents/restricted/D1.4_PMH_530951-2012-KA2.pdf 2. The siLang Learning Requirements and Methodologies Report (D2.1), on-line at: http://www.si-lang.net/index.php/reports
