What could be the differences between a virtual and a face-to-face context for learning?

GOLDSTEIN J; DELGADO T; HAIMOVICI A; CALERO CI

Conferencia; VI Encuentro de Investigadores en Desarrollo, Aprendizaje y Educación. Argentina; 2021

Recent models have proposed a Bayesian approximation for understanding pedagogical situations (Shafto et al, 2008) in which a knowledgeable teacher chooses limited examples with the objective of having a learner infer (‘learn’) a concept. On this basis, a question arises: how does prior information about the teacher’s identity and his or her teaching strategies would affect learners’ inferences of new concepts? And moreover, in the current context of remote education forced by the pandemic, are there any differences in the effect of knowing the teacher and his or her teaching strategies?We present here a new paradigm, based on the Rectangle Game in which a teacher helps a learner to find a secret box on the screen using a limited set of cues. First, young adults were placed in the learners’ role knowing (or not) that they were receiving cues generated by a teacher, but there was a catch… teachers were 2nd, 4th or 6th graders. Then those same adults were placed in the teachers’ role themselves. Our preliminary face-to-face interactions results indicate that (1) performance increases when playing consecutively with the same teacher and (2) knowing the teachers’ age has a complex impact on the learning process. Although it is significantly useful when there is no other information available, it seems to be overshadowed by the knowledge acquired along the trials about the teachers’ particular strategies. In fact, it had a significant negative effect on performance for learners whose teachers were 2nd graders. As the pandemic drags on, we wondered whether this results would held but in an online context. Our ongoing results suggest that in the current context, knowing the teacher’s age has a less significant value than it has in a one-to-one context. Instead, subjects seem to rely exclusively in the quality of those strategies used by their teachers.Interestingly, in both experiments adults in the teachers’ role chose examples highly biased by the strategies used by their teachers, even when they reported those as “bad cues”. Our preliminary results strongly suggest that we do not learn in the same way in different contexts and that prior knowledge about teachers affects differently depending on weather it is a remote education or a face-to-face interaction context.