Benefits seen for students teaching virtual pupils

Virtual teaching has become something that has become more and more common throughout the years. "Benefits seen for students teaching virtual pupils", is an interesting article about researchers at Stanford University who is developing a half dozen computer programs that gives students the opportunity to customize a virtual agent and teach it mathematics or science concepts." The agent questions, misunderstands, and otherwise learns realistically. For example, in the Betty’s Brain program, a concept map represents the character’s thought process, and students teach her by making logic chains. Showing how garbage contributes to global warming, for example, requires connecting eight separate causal inferences." Researchers believe that this is a way to motivate students and help them to learn more effectively through the teaching of others.

"Educators have long held that peer tutoring can help students learn, and emerging research on students working with computer characters points to one possible reason why: Teaching begets learning for the teacher, too". I feel that this is so true. I have found that by giving students the opportunity to teach each other it gives the students confidence and enhance their understanding of the topic. It is also a positive effect on learning for the students because when you are teaching yourself something many times we trick ourselves in to thinking we understand the concept. When we teach the concept to someone else it helps to guarantee that the students understands what they are teaching.

The article also talks about the results of the researchers and the effects the programs played in students academic success. Studies showed that student teachers scored higher on test and quiz those who were not teaching others concepts. I feel that these results are accurate because when you teach someone else a concept not only does it help the students, it helps the students teacher as well because it gives them practice and reinforcement of the subject area. This is something that I am interested in learning and I plan on research more.

Retrieved from: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/10/28/10avatar.h30.html?tkn=PLTFEfpTAgxFuAkN1aJrti5XCcRo+ESlYV89&cmp=clp-edweek