The Interactive Virtual Training for Teachers (IVT-T) to Practice Classroom Behavior Management

In this article, we discuss the 3D Interactive Virtual Training for Teachers system (IVT-T) which we built for teachers to hone in their classroom management skills. By interacting with thirty fully autonomous and animated realistic 3D virtual students in two detailed and realistic 3D classrooms, teachers can practice their behavior management and receive feedback and reflection opportunities on their performances. Lack of experience in managing students’ disruptive behavior in classrooms is one of the main causes of teacher turnover and IVT-T provides them with such an experience in virtual reality using 3D graphics and spatialized sounds. IVT-T is a low-cost stand-alone fully autonomous system that teachers can interact with on their laptop, without special equipment or personnel to operate the system. Although previous training systems for teachers have been successfully developed, requirements to guide future research and development of such systems have not been established. We present a set of six requirements (Behavioral Fidelity, Environment Fidelity, Instructional Design, Autonomy, Interactivity, and Scalability) for VTEs for teachers established from our survey of the literature and from our iterative lifecycle activities to build IVT-T. We describe IVT-T's modular architecture designed to meet these VTE requirements and to enable the addition of an integrated intelligent tutor. We evaluated IVT-T to assess whether all requirements have been met. The evaluation of the behavioral and graphical fidelity of our virtual students conducted by education experts using mixed methods indicated that IVT-Ts graphics and students’ behaviors were very realistic. The evaluation of IVT-T's User Interface (UI) usability confirmed IVT-T's effectiveness, efficiency, and learnability. We present current findings supporting the soundness of IVT-T instructional design. We conclude with implications of our proposed requirements for future VTEs for learning social skills, and our future plans for IVT-T.