Virtual Access to STEM Careers: In the Field Experiments.

The Virtual Access to STEM Careers (VASC) project is an intertwined classroom and virtual reality (VR) curricular program for third through fourth graders. Elementary school students learn about and take on the roles and responsibilities of STEM occupations through authentic, problem-based tasks with physical kits and immersive VR environments. This article reports on a round of curriculum and virtual environment development and in-classroom experimentation that was guided by preliminary results gathered from our initial VASC prototyping and testing. This specific iteration focuses on curriculum for learning about sea turtles and tasks regularly completed by park rangers and marine biologists who work with these creatures and a new backend data collection component to analyze participant behavior. Our results showed that educators were able to setup and integrate VASC into their classrooms with relative ease. Elementary school students were able to learn how to interface with our system quickly and enjoyed being in the environment, making a positive link to STEM education.

Simultaneous Prompting to Teach Intraverbal Synonyms to Struggling Readers.

In simultaneous prompting procedures, an immediate (i.e., 0-s) prompt is presented during all training trials, and transfer to the target discriminative condition is assessed during daily probes. Previous research suggests that simultaneous prompting procedures are efficacious and may produce acquisition in fewer errors to mastery when compared to prompt delay procedures. To date, only a single study on simultaneous prompting has included intraverbal targets. The current study evaluated the efficacy of a simultaneous prompting procedure on the acquisition of intraverbal synonyms for six children at risk for reading failure. Simultaneous prompting alone produced responding at mastery levels in seven of the 12 evaluations. Antecedent-based procedural modifications were effective in four of the five remaining evaluations. Errors were generally low for all but one participant. The current findings support the use of simultaneous prompting procedures when targeting intraverbals for young children exhibiting reading deficits.

Building Prealgebra Fluency Through a Self-Managed Practice Intervention: Order of Operations.

Behavioral fluency refers to a combination of accuracy and speed that enables students to function proficiently in the learning environment. The present study investigated the effects of a self-managed frequency-building intervention on the behavioral fluency of a critical prealgebra skill in four 6th-grade students. The intervention involved students having access to the PEMDAS (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction) mnemonic during frequency building. Using an alternating-treatments design, the first experimental condition presented the intervention as three 1-min practice trials with 30 s of feedback delivered immediately after each frequency-building trial ended. The second condition offered one 3-min practice trial with 90 s of feedback once the trial ended. A baseline condition (no practice) had the students engage in a 1-min timed trial with no feedback. The alternating-treatments design demonstrated that three of the four students produced a superior performance within the two intervention conditions when compared to baseline. However, the results did not conclusively show that one frequency-building intervention was superior to the other.