Justin Reich

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · Teaching Systems Lab

The quality of education hinges on the proficiency and training of educators. Due to the importance of teacher training, the innovative platform Teacher Moments creates simulated classroom scenarios. In this scenario‐based learning, confusion is an important indicator to detect users who struggle with the simulations. Through Teacher Moments, we ga...

There is an urgent need to build the public’s resilience in the face of disinformation. Nevertheless, librarians may be hesitant to assume a frontline role in confronting politicized misinformation. We conducted ethnographic observations and interviews across three Montana libraries to understand the informational needs and search habits of library...

Eliciting and interpreting students’ ideas are essential skills in teaching, yet pre-service teachers (PSTs) rarely have adequate opportunities to develop these skills. In this study, we examine PSTs’ patterns of discourse and perceived learning through engaging in an interactive digital simulation called Eliciting Learner Knowledge (ELK). ELK is a...

While school educators are increasingly interested in adopting maker pedagogy, many schools struggle to integrate making with their existing core curriculum because of the difficulty in assessing the learning that occurs in maker classrooms. To address this issue, we collaborated with educators on design-based research focused on assessment in make...

Teacher educators use digital clinical simulations (DCS) to provide improvisation opportunities within low-stakes classroom environments. In this study, we experimented with GPT-3 and few-shot learning to examine if it could be used with open-text DCS responses. We found that GPT-3 performed substantially worse than traditional machine learning (ML...

Given the widespread evidence of discriminatory behavior and widening racial disparities, it is imperative that educators address systemic inequities in education. Clinical simulations are a promising vehicle for helping educators identify and disrupt inequity in teaching. We developed a short digital learning intervention—a digital clinical simula...

Role-plays of interpersonal interactions are essential to learning across professions, but effective simulations are difficult to create in typical learning management systems. To empower educators and researchers to advance simulation-based pedagogy, we have developed the Digital Clinical Simulation Suite (DCSS, pronounced “decks”), an open-source...

Equitable teaching practice is attracting growing attention in teacher education because there is increased awareness for the need to support the variability of students. This study aims to examine the use of digital clinical simulation-based learning and the role of support to influence equitable teaching practice. Using a mixed-methods design, da...

The massive racial inequities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide protests in response to the killings of unarmed Black people forced a reckoning among many educators about racial injustice in the educational system. In March 2020, we launched a massive open online course designed to support teachers in adopting antiracist equity mi...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) remarkably attracted global media attention, but the spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of English-language providers. While Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn received most of the attention and scrutiny, an entirely new ecosystem of local MOOC providers was growing in parallel. This ecosystem is h...

This paper explores how the use of digital practice spaces (DPSs) can inform teacher preparation through a reimagining of clinical practice in teacher preparation by addressing the question: what roles might DPSs play in the ecology of apprenticeship opportunities for future educators? We leveraged AACTE’s Essential Proclamations and Tenets for Hig...

This paper explores how the use of digital practice spaces (DPSs) can inform teacher preparation through a reimagining of clinical practice in teacher preparation by addressing the question: what roles might DPSs play in the ecology of apprenticeship opportunities for future educators? We leveraged AACTE’s Essential Proclamations and Tenets for Hig...

We summarize the results of a field scan that set out to describe the current state of math teacher learning and promising future directions for improving math teaching and learning for all learners, particularly those most underestimated by the education system. We share five key learnings: (1) math teacher learning is in a "steady state," where s...

To develop an in-depth, nuanced understanding of what teaching was like during the COVID-impacted 2020-21 academic school year, we interviewed 57 U.S. PK-12 teachers from across the country in public, charter, and private schools, at different grade levels, and in different subject areas. The primary message we heard from teachers is that they have...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues are urgent in education. We developed and evaluated a massive open online course ( N = 963) with embedded equity simulations that attempted to equip educators with equity teaching practices. Applying a structural topic model (STM)—a type of natural language processing (NLP)—we examined how participants...

Teacher Moments is an open source platform that allows the authoring of simulations used for education which we recently revised to integrate intelligent coaching agents. The initial simulation development for Teacher Moments focused on teacher education, but the platform is actively used for professional development with nurses, psychologists, pol...

jats:p>Practice is essential for learning. However, for many interpersonal skills, there often are not enough opportunities and venues for novices to repeatedly practice. Role-playing simulations offer a promising framework to advance practice-based professional training for complex communication skills, in fields such as teaching. In this work, we...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many forms of learning, including teacher education, have shifted online. However, with this shift comes the concern that more advantaged populations might benefit more from online learning. In this study, we examined the school demographics of educators in four pre-COVID 19 education professional learning Massi...

The public schoolhouse is one of the few remaining public spaces in which citizens may routinely gather to discuss controversial issues. Furthermore, it is social studies classrooms and teachers, in particular, that bear the moral imperative to ensure such civic discourse takes place. Nevertheless, many social studies teachers refrain from centerin...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many forms of learning, including teacher education, have shifted online. However, with this shift comes the concern that more advantaged populations might benefit more from online learning. In this study, we examined the school demographics of educators in four pre-COVID 19 education professional learning Massi...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues are urgent in education, given the widespread evidence of discriminatory behavior and widening racial disparities. Although DEI trainings can change participants’ attitudes they have minimal effects on behaviors. Simulations are a promising approach to address this gap between attitudinal and behavioral...

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become popular in various regions of the world through the years. Since 2008, this phenomenon has received plenty of attention from higher education and universities across countries began to produce these courses. The countries of Europe and the United States are the world's leading producers of MOOCs and r...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we...

Digital clinical simulations (DCSs) are a promising tool for professional learning on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues across a variety of fields. Although digital clinical simulations can be integrated into large-scale learning environments, less is known about how to design these types of simulations so they can scale effectively. We...

To more deeply understand the practice and professional experiences of educators during the 2020 extended school closures, we interviewed 40 teachers from across the country in public, charter, and private schools, at different grade levels, and in different subject areas. From our conversations, three key themes emerged: 1) Student Motivation: Tea...

Many higher education institutions have begun offering opportunities to earn credit for in-person courses through massive open online courses (MOOCs). This mixed-methods study examines the experiences of students participating in one of the first iterations of this trend: a blended professional master's degree program that admitted students based o...

In March of 2020, we launched Becoming a More Equitable Educator, a free online course for educators about anti-racist teaching, educator mindsets, and equity teaching practices. This report describes the design of the course, the experience of participants, and early research findings.

As massive open online courses (MOOCs) shift toward professional degree and certificate programs, can they become a global on-ramp for increasing access to emerging fields for underrepresented groups? This mixed-methods study addresses this question by examining one of the first MOOC-based blended professional degree programs, which admitted studen...

Significance Low persistence in educational programs is a major obstacle to social mobility. Scientists have proposed many scalable interventions to support students learning online. In one of the largest international field experiments in education, we iteratively tested established behavioral science interventions and found small benefits dependi...

Teacher Moments is an open source resource for teacher educators to create and use practice-based simulations in teacher education. Teacher Moments may be used to create digital clinical simulations (DCS) which are defined as opportunities for improvisational interaction with scripted character(s). During the COVID-19 crisis, we implemented an equi...

La creciente utilización de sistemas de mediación digital en la mayoría de espacios educativos –ya sean presenciales o no, formales o abiertos, y tanto en el nivel de educación básica como en situaciones de aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida– está acelerando el avance de la analítica del aprendizaje y haciendo que el uso de la información digital se...

How can large-scale online learning serve professionals' learning needs which are often highly localized? In this mixed-methods study, we examine this question through studying the learning experiences of participants in four massive open online courses (MOOCs) that we developed on educational change leadership (N = 1,712). We observed that partici...

In this paper we explore how to support teacher educators to author their own digital clinical simulations to prepare K-12 pre-service computer science teachers. Teacher educators have the potential to create simulations about relevant content for their teacher preparation programs and contextualize those simulations for their students. To benefit...

In a design-based implementation study, we supported 11 teacher educators from diverse institutions across the country in implementing new approaches to practice-based teacher education. We observed that teacher educators proceeded through a developmental process in implementing new approaches, and we propose the Practice Based Teacher Education (P...

We analyze the state education agency policy guidance concerning remote learning published by all 50 U.S. states by the end of March 2020. We find several areas of consensus, including cancellation of testing, recommendations to continue some form of remote learning, attention to digital and non-digital options, and a concerns for providing a fair...

In a design-based implementation study, we supported 11 teacher educators from diverse institutions across the country in implementing new approaches to practice-based teacher education. We observed that teacher educators proceeded through a developmental process in implementing new approaches, and we propose the Practice Based Teacher Education (P...

Registered reports engender a review process in which reviewers evaluate the merits of the research question rather than the magnitude or direction of the results. In this process, authors first submit introduction, methods, and prespecified analyses sections of an article. Next, an initial peer-review process assesses the merits of the research qu...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened new educational possibilities for learners around the world. Most of the research and spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of global, English-language providers, but there are a growing number of regional providers of MOOCS in languages other than English. In this work, we have partnered with...

Recent studies of massive open online courses (MOOCs) have focused on global providers such as edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn, with less attention to local initiatives that target regional learners. In this study we combine data from the main edX platform and one regional MOOC provider, Edraak in Jordan, to explore differences in learners’ behavior...

While there is growing interest among educators in bringing the maker movement into school environments, many schools struggle to closely integrate making into their existing core curriculum, mostly due to the difficulty in assessing learning in maker classrooms. Because of the unique nature of maker-centered learning as a pedagogy, conventional as...

The relationship between pricing and learning behavior is an important topic in research on massive open online courses (MOOCs). We report on two case studies where cohorts of learners were offered coupons for free certificates to explore how price reductions might influence behavior in MOOC-based online learning settings. In Case Study 1, we compa...

2020 Association for Computing Machinery. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened new educational possibilities for learners around the world. Most of the research and spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of global, English-language providers, but there are a growing number of regional providers of MOOCS in languages other than Engl...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened new educational possibilities for learners around the world. Numerous providers have emerged, which usually have different targets (geographical, topics or language), but most of the research and spotlight has been concentrated on the global providers and studies with limited generalizability. In this...

Compared to other helping professions, teacher training typically lacks sufficient opportunities for novices to practice new skills. When teachers learn, they listen to people talk about teaching, or talk about teaching themselves, but they very rarely do the work of teaching. Games and simulations offer a promising framework to advance practice-ba...

Competency-Based Education: The Why, What, and How (January 31-March 13, 2019) was amassive open online course (MOOC) that invited learners to consider the nature of competency-basededucation (CBE), why schools pursue it, and the opportunities and challenges educators and others facewhen implementing it. The course featured schools at various stage...

Approximations of practice to support preservice teachers' development.

The mission of the Teaching Systems Lab is to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. Between 2017 and 2019, the lab released four MOOCs on change leadership, including Launching Innovation in Schools, Design Thinking for Leading and Learning, Envisioning the Graduate of the Future, and Competency-Based Education: The What, W...

The relationship between pricing and learning behavior is an increasingly important topic in MOOC (massive open online course) research. We report on two case studies where cohorts of learners were offered coupons for free-certificates to explore price reductions might influence user behavior in MOOC-based online learning settings. In Case Study #1...

While global massive open online course (MOOC) providers such as edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn have garnered the bulk of attention from researchers and the popular press, MOOCs are also provisioned by a series of regional providers, who are often using the Open edX platform. We leverage the data infrastructure shared by the main edX instance and o...

2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. The relationship between pricing and learning behavior is an increasingly important topic in MOOC (massive open online course) research. We report on two case studies where cohorts of learners were offered coupons for free-certificates to explore price reductions might...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Massive Open Online Courses, EMOOCs 2019, held in Naples, Italy, in May 2019. The 15 full and 6 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have marked a milestone in the use of technology...

Interactive simulations allow preservice teachers to connect education theory and pedagogy in scaffolded environments. We created digital simulations with scenarios from in-person simulations and used them to prepare novice teachers for conversations with parents. Using a design-based approach we implemented the simulations in an education class, g...

While global massive open online course (MOOC) providers such as edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn have garnered the bulk of attention from researchers and the popular press, MOOCs are also provisioned by a series of regional providers, who are often using the Open edX platform. We leverage the data infrastructure shared by the main edX instance and o...

Although maker-centered learning in schools has grown rapidly in recent years, the existing assessment approaches often do not meet the needs in assessing the multifaceted learning and development that occur in making processes. This short research paper reports on the design principles of embedded assessment and shares insights gained from working...

In computer science classrooms, the assumptions teachers have about students can significantly shape their interactions. Deeper understandings of the decisions impacting equity offers teacher educators and researchers new leverage in cultivating equitable teaching. Our work uses interactive online practice spaces to focus on specific teaching decis...

Teacher preparation programs are beginning to embrace new ways for teacher candidates to practice enacting complex professional activities, such as digital simulations. It can be challenging for teacher educators to support teacher candidates in learning through these experiences when the records of practice are stored in audio or video files. This...

When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world's best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded as...

This study investigates the distribution of student collaborative behaviors in a sample of 406 US K-12 wikis randomly drawn from a population of 179,851 publicly viewable, education-related wikis. Aided by computational tools, trained human coders conducted a large-scale content analysis examining every revision to every page of each of these 406 w...

Many higher education institutions have begun offering opportunities to earn credit for in-person courses through massive open online courses (MOOCs). This mixed-methods study examines the experiences of students participating in one of the first iterations of this trend: a blended professional master's degree program that admitted students based o...

Envisioning the Graduate of the Future (March 8 to April 5, 2018) was an experiment in rapidly producing a compelling, open, online learning experience. This massive open online course (MOOC) featured schools at various stages of developing their vision of a high school graduate. Over 2,000 educators and others from across the United States and 100...

Scientific progress is built on research that is reliable, accurate, and verifiable. The methods and evidentiary reasoning that underlie scientific claims must be available for scrutiny. Like other fields, the education sciences suffer from problems such as failure to replicate, validity and generalization issues, publication bias, and high costs o...

Over two iterations of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for school leaders, Launching Innovation in Schools, we developed and tested design elements to support the transfer of online learning into offline action. Effective professional learning is job-embedded: learners should employ new skills and knowledge at work. We aimed to get participants...

Simulations allow preservice teachers to connect education theory and practice in low-risk environments. This study presents findings from our investigation of the suitability of a simulation called “Teacher Moments” for two parent-teacher conference scenarios. Students in a preservice education class completed two Teacher Moments simulations as as...

Teacher practice spaces are learning environments, inspired by games and simulations, that allow teachers to rehearse for and reflect upon important decisions in teaching. Practice-based teacher educators use a variety of approaches to simulation in methods courses and other professional learning opportunities, and existing simulations often attemp...

Teacher practice spaces are learning experiences, inspired by games and simulations, that allow novice teachers to rehearse for and reflect on important decisions in teaching. Practice-based teacher educators use various approaches to simulation in methods courses, and these simulations often attempt to holistically replicate the complexity of teac...

As providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to experiment with new mechanisms for providing transferable course credit and alternative credentials (Caudill, 2017; Hollands, 2017; Wulf, Blohm, & Brenner, 2014), there has been a growing interest in the experiences of students in these programs. This mixed-methods studies uses student...

Equity is a core component of many computer science teacher preparation programs. One promising approach is addressing unconscious bias in teachers, which may impact teacher expectations and interactions with students. Since early intervention literature indicates that asking individuals to suppress biases is counterproductive, our work uses online...

Equity is a core component of many computer science teacher preparation programs. One promising approach is addressing unconscious bias in teachers related to the race, ethnicity or gender of students. These biases may impact teacher expectations and interactions with students in a variety of classroom scenarios. Early literature on interventions t...

Scientific progress is built on research that is reliable, accurate, and verifiable. The methods and evidentiary reasoning that underlie scientific claims must be available for scrutiny. Like other fields, the education sciences suffers from problems such as failure to replicate, validity and generalization issues, publication bias, and high costs...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) attract diverse student bodies, and course forums could potentially be an opportunity for students with different political beliefs to engage with one another. We test whether this engagement actually takes place in two politically-themed MOOCs, on education policy and American government. We collect measures of...

Equity is a core component of many computer science teacher preparation programs. One promising approach is addressing unconscious bias in teachers, which may impact teacher expectations and interactions with students. Since early intervention literature indicates that asking individuals to suppress biases is counterproductive, our work uses online...

Created by Justin Reich and a team of instructional designers from the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, 11.155x: Design Thinking for Leading and Learning asks school leaders at all levels—teacher-leaders, principals, superintendents, and public officials—the following key questions:• Future jobs will require creativity, problem-solving and communication....

Games can help teachers develop and practice important skills. We examined the question of how might we design a game to initiate high quality student work analysis?

Games can help teachers develop and practice important skills. Can integrating student work analysis into a game help participants focus on, attend to details, and make sense of student work?