Examining the connection between preservice teachers’ discussion performance in a mixed reality teaching simulation with their self-reported goals and success in facilitating discussions

With the growing use of mixed reality teaching simulations in teacher education there is a need for researchers to examine how preservice teacher (PST) learning can be supported when using these simulations. To address this gap the current study explores how 47 PSTs used an online teaching simulation to facilitate a discussion focused on argumentation with five student avatars in the Mursion^TM mixed reality simulated classroom environment. We assessed PSTs' performance in the simulation using rubric-level scores assigned by trained raters and then compared the scores to PSTs' survey responses completed after their discussion asking them to self-report their goals for the discussion, how successful they thought they were across five dimensions of facilitating high-quality, argumentation-focused discussions, and their overall perceptions of the mixed reality teaching simulation. Findings suggest that PSTs' understanding of the discussion task's learning goals somewhat predicted their success in facilitating the discussion and that PSTs' self-assessment of their performance was not always consistent with raters' evaluation of the PSTs' performance. In particular, self-assessment was found to be most consistent with raters' evaluations for those PSTs with higher rater-assigned scores and least consistent for those with lower rater-assigned scores. The implications of these findings are as follows: (1) researchers should be cautious in relying on PST self-report of success when engaging in mixed reality teaching simulations, particularly because low performance may be obscured, (2) teacher educators should be aware that reliance on self-report from PSTs likely obscures the need for additional support for exactly those PSTs who need it most, and (3) the field, therefore, should expand efforts to measure PSTs' performance when using mixed reality teaching simulations.