Everybody needs some body to teach: Embodiment and telepresence in STEM learning

Abstract

This paper outlines a new project for providing STEM education to remotely situated students in the absence of local STEM expertise using telepresence, augmented reality, and virtual reality. It uses the context of rural school districts with a high concentration of minority students to provide real-world grounding for the research being conducted. Rural and small towns lag behind the suburbs and cities in science education. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 12th graders scored 11 and 19 for town and rural students, while students from the city or the suburbs scored 29 and 41, respectively. This town and rural students account for over 20% of all US public schools. A critical reason for this is a lack of STEM teaching expertise. Only 47% of science teachers have a science or engineering degree. STEM employment grew 24.4% over the last decade, compared to a 4% growth in other occupations. STEM workers earn 29% more than non-STEM workers. This trend holds despite educational level. Despite this, women make up only 25% of computer scientists and 14% of engineers. African-Americans and Hispanics make up 14% and 13%, respectively. A lack of quality education to prepare for STEM fields, a lack of encouragement to pursue STEM from an early age, being less likely to believe they can succeed in STEM, and a lack of role models are all reasons given for these numbers. Income also has a factor on willingness to believe in one's ability to succeed at STEM and likelihood to self-select into STEM. Students from low income families were more than twice as likely to elect not to enroll in science classes than students from high income families, and four times as likely to believe they are unlikely to complete a bachelor's degree. These issues all demand STEM educators. However, there is a severe issue with the STEM educator pipeline. Just 0.17% of high school students with an interest in STEM who take the ACT plan to pursue an occupation or college major in science education. This paper builds on a 3-year project that placed University-based students in a distance-teaching mode to support physically-predicated technical learning in a distal high school at the Texas-Mexico border. These university students fill in a key gap in these high schools as STEM mentors, role-models, and instructors. Our interventions took place at a school many hours distant from the supporting university students, which makes the use of remote technologies essential for providing STEM support. University students met with high school students through video teleconference. We compared mentor representations and interactions with these models and compare them to thegold-standard of co-present instruction. This paper lays out the real-world context in which our research takes place, explaining the practical testing grounds for the research being conducted. It provides a solution to finding STEM experts to provide STEM expertise to isolated rural classrooms. A pilot study is explained and examined which highlights some of the difficulties of using a telepresence solution. The experiences and results of this study formed the basis for the research project. Finally, we detail the project and the initial phases of research. Our research focuses on how embodied communication, involving speech, gaze, and gesture, may be mediated through mobile telepresence technologies to support hands-on distance instruction. We will discuss some initial ideas for using augmented and virtual reality to bring elements of physically embodied interaction into the telepresence arena.