Augmented reality (AR) technology is mature for creating learning experiences for K-12 (pre-school, grade school, and high school) educational settings. We reviewed the applications intended to complement traditional curriculum materials for K-12. We found 87 research articles on augmented reality learning experiences (ARLEs) in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and other learning technology publications. Forty-three of these articles conducted user studies, and seven allowed the computation of an effect size to the performance of students in a test. In our meta-analysis, research show that ARLEs achieved a widely variable effect on student performance from a small negative effect to a large effect, with a mean effect size of 0.56 or moderate effect. To complement this finding, we performed a qualitative analysis on the design aspects for ARLEs: display hardware, software libraries, content authoring solutions, and evaluation techniques. We explain that AR incur three inherent advantages: real world annotation, contextual visualization, and vision-haptic visualization. We illustrate these advantages through the exemplifying prototypes, and ground these advantages to multimedia learning theory, experiential learning theory, and animate vision theory. Insights from this review are aimed to inform the design of future ARLEs.

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to create compelling learning experiences. However, there are few research works exploring the design and evaluation of AR for educational settings. In our research, we treat AR as a type of multimedia that is situated in authentic environments and apply multimedia learning theory as a framework for developing our educational applications. We share our experiences in developing a handheld AR system and one specific use case, namely, situated vocabulary learning. Results of our evaluations show that we are able to create AR applications with good system usability. More importantly, our preliminary evaluations show that AR may lead to better retention of words and improve student attention and satisfaction.

Usability evaluations are important to improving handheld augmented reality (HAR) systems. However, no standard questionnaire considers perceptual and ergonomic issues found in HAR. The authors performed a systematic literature review to enumerate these issues. Based on these issues, they created a HAR usability scale that consists of comprehensibility and manipulability scales. These scales measure general system usability, ease of understanding the information presented, and ease of handling the device. The questionnaires' validity and reliability were evaluated in four experiments, and the results show that the questionnaires consistently correlate with other subjective and objective measures of usability. The questionnaires also have good reliability based on the Cronbach's alpha. Researchers and professionals can directly use these questionnaires to evaluate their own HAR applications or modify them with the insights presented in this article.

Figure 1: We created a usability scale for evaluating handheld augmented reality (HAR) applications. We defined our usability scale based on perceptual and ergonomic issues encountered by users, and then assessed it using three experiments representative of common HAR tasks. AbstractHandheld augmented reality (HAR) applications must be carefully designed and improved based on user feedback to sustain commercial use. However, no standard questionnaire considers perceptual and ergonomic issues found in HAR. We address this issue by creating a HAR Usability Scale (HARUS).To create HARUS, we performed a systematic literature review to enumerate user-reported issues in HAR applications. Based on these issues, we created a questionnaire measuring manipulability -the ease of handling the HAR system, and comprehensibilitythe ease of understanding the information presented by HAR. We then provide evidences of validity and reliability of the HARUS questionnaire by applying it to three experiments. The results show that HARUS consistently correlates with other subjective and objective measures of usability, thereby supporting its concurrent validity. Moreover, HARUS obtained a good Cronbach's alpha in all three experiments, thereby demonstrating internally consistency.HARUS, as well as its decomposition into individual manipulability and comprehensibility scores, are evaluation tools that researchers and professionals can use to analyze their HAR applications. By providing such a tool, they can gain quality feedback from users to improve their HAR applications towards commercial success.

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