January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

playing the game. This would mean Piaget’s theory of stages of development, as defined above, fit these students’
responses.
What we can say from this study is that students in sixth and seventh grades are capable of completing an online
survey and having a post-module discussion with their teacher about their experiences within an immersive VE
module. From these two sets of data (surveys and post-module discussion talk), different impressions of the students’
level of perceived presence were found, which may relate to their level of development as defined by Piaget. From
the surveys, the students demonstrated no difference between grades and genders for indicating level of presence in
the game achieved. From the post-module discussion, all students who talked appear to have achieved some level of
presence given the language they used to express their experiences within the game. They were more likely to use
first and second person language to describe their interactions with the characters in the modules than impersonal
third person language. The difference in these findings may be due to impersonal nature of the survey where
responses were not acknowledged versus the personal discussion with their teacher who responded to their
conversation in turn.
Limitations and future research
It is important to point out some limitations to this research. First of all, there was no control group. All students
participated by playing one of the games developed through the SAVE Science project. Hence, there is no way to
demonstrate that this group of students was different or unique as sixth and seventh grade students. Secondly, they
all were from non-urban setting schools. While the demographics of these students is not fully known, the teachers
reported verbally that the majority of their students (e.g., >90%) were Caucasian, native English speakers who were
not identified as Special Education students. These reported demographics indicate the findings are not generalizable
beyond this group of students.
In addition, we did not administer any instrument to determine the exact level of Piaget’s child development for these
students. We are surmising that students who are in sixth grade will more likely be in the Concrete Operations stage,
and those in seventh grade will be moving into the Formal Operations stage, both based on age. However, it is
important to note that without formal assessment, we do not know exactly in which stage of development these
children fall.
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge the post-doctoral project manager, Uma Natarajan, along with graduate research assistants—
Angela Shelton, Amanda Kirchgessner, Chris Teufel, Tera Kane and Kamala Kandi—for their help in both
transcribing these recordings as well as helping to analyze the data. In addition, we thank Dr. Joseph Ducette for his
assistance with statistics. Further we thank the teachers who so enthusiastically engaged in implementing SAVE
Science assessments with their students, and continue to do so. This material is based upon work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0822308.
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