Preservice special education teachers need to develop essential teaching skills to competently address student academics and behavior in the classroom. TeachLivETM is a sophisticated virtual simulation that has recently emerged in teacher preparation programs to supplement traditional didactic instruction and field experiences. Teacher educators can engineer scenarios in TeachLivETM to cumulatively build in complexity, allowing preservice teachers to incrementally interleave target skills in increasingly difficult situations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of TeachLivETM on preservice special education teachers’ delivery of error correction, specific praise, and praise around in the virtual environment and in authentic classroom settings. Four preservice special educators who were teaching on provisional licenses in upper elementary language arts classrooms participated in this multiple baseline study across target skills. Participants attended weekly TeachLivETM sessions as a group, where they engaged in three short teaching turns followed by structured feedback. Participants’ proficiency with the target skills was analyzed on three weekly assessments. First, participants’ mastery of current and previous target skills was measured during their third teaching turn of the intervention session (i.e., TeachLivETM training assessment). Next, participants’ proficiency with all skills, including those that had not been targeted yet in intervention, were measured immediately following intervention sessions (i.e., TeachLivETM comprehensive assessment). Finally, teachers submitted a weekly video recording of a lesson in their real classroom (i.e. classroom generalization assessment). Repeated practice and feedback in TeachLivETM promoted participants’ mastery of essential target skills. Specifically, all participants demonstrated proficiency with error correction, specific praise, and praise around on both the TeachLivETM training assessment and the more complex TeachLivETM comprehensive assessment, with a strong pattern of generalized performance to authentic classroom settings. Participants maintained proficiency with the majority of the target skills in both environments when assessed approximately one month after intervention was discontinued. Implications of the study are discussed, including the power of interleaved practice in TeachLivETM and how generalization and maintenance may be impacted by the degree of alignment between virtual and real teaching scenarios.

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceived effectiveness of mixed reality experiences on resident teachers who successfully completed an undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) degree and were enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree program as part of RTP3 at a large research university in Orlando, Florida. The population for this study consisted of those selected to be in the RTP3, which included being in the Masters in the Art of Teaching (MAT) and becoming a middle or high school science, mathematics, or engineering teacher. The resident teachers experienced mixed reality as a method of practice on two occasions. The first was to introduce a lesson with avatar middle school students and a second time to conduct a parent conference with an avatar parent. This study was focused on the resident teachers' perceptions of (a) the effectiveness of mixed reality in the lesson experience and parent conference, (b) the coach's helpfulness after the lesson introduction experience and the parent conference experience, and (c) the extent to which the resident teachers believe that their confidence was increased and they were prepared for future classroom instruction and parent interactions through the use of mixed reality. Data were gathered with a feedback form with Likert-type items and open ended items completed immediately upon completion of each experience, as well as an additional open response document completed at a later time after reflection on the entire experience. The researcher analyzed the two qualitative data sources independently to determine trends and themes. Findings in this study were that the mixed-reality laboratory experience did have a positive effect on the perceptions of the resident teachers regarding their level of preparedness. They were more confident and comfortable teaching a lesson and conducting a parent conference after practicing both experiences with the avatars. Resident teachers overwhelmingly responded that the mixed reality experiences should remain a part of the MAT pedagogy and that they gained insight and confidence through the mixed reality practice. ?

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