Exploring through Simulation the Effects of Peer Impact on Learning

Simulation modelling helps designers to keep track of many possible behaviours in a complex environment. Having a technique to simulate the effect of peer impact on learning allows designers to test the social effects of their educational software. We implement an agent-based simulation model based on the ecological approach (EA) architecture [9]. The model considers learner attributes, learning object attributes and two styles of peer impact to explore the effects when learners are either positively or negatively impacted by high achieving peers. In this study, we observe different patterns of behaviour based on the style of peer impact and by limiting simulated learners’ access to information (the EA metadata). Gaining understanding of these patterns will inform our future work on recommending sequences of learning objects (LOs).