Visualizing student engagement with simulations: A dashboard to characterize and differentiate instructional approaches

Abstract

A central idea behind educational interactive simulations (sims) is that students’ learning and experience is shaped through their interactions with the simulation. Prior work has established that student interaction and engagement with sims is influenced by the instructional strategies used in sim-based lessons. This finding motivates the need for tools to record, analyze, and report on students’ interactions with sims during their learning experiences. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of a new teacher dashboard for sims, specifically examining the dashboard’s ability to characterize and differentiate students’ engagement with two different instructional approaches in homework activities. One instructional approach invited students to discover essential variables via challenge-style questions, while the second asked students to make predictions and observations given specific actions in the sim. The experiment was conducted in college introductory physics courses and repeated for two sims, PhET's Energy Skate Park: Basics sim and Forces and Motion: Basics sim. The results demonstrate that the new teacher dashboard can successfully capture students’ interactions and help identify the differences in engagement across these activities. In this case, the dashboard showed students’ exploration of the sim elements and their total time of interaction increased in Challenge-style questions. We reflect on the capabilities of the dashboard and its role in instructional design.