Ready student one: Exploring the predictors of student learning in virtual reality

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality (VR) has enormous potential for education, but classroom resources are limited. Thus, it is important to identify whether and when VR provides sufficient advantages over other modes of learning to justify its deployment. In a between-subjects experiment, we compared three methods of teaching Moon phases (a hands-on activity, VR, and a desktop simulation) and measured student improvement on existing learning and attitudinal measures. While a substantial majority of students preferred the VR experience, we found no significant differences in learning between conditions. However, we found differences between conditions based on gender, which was highly correlated with experience with video games. These differences may indicate certain groups have an advantage in the VR setting. are many potential explanations for these differences [14], two relate to how learners and technology interact through issues of embodiment and real-world complexities. This study aimed to test the impact of these variables by directly comparing student learning and attitudes from three different instructional technologies (a hands-on activity, desktop simulation, and virtual reality simulation), while taking advantage of their respective affordances along the dimensions of embodiment and real-world complexity. EmbodimentTheories of learning argue that cognition is inherently embodied: "the mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to a physical body that interacts with the world." [15, p.625]. Research has found that learning benefits from activities that explicitly attend to embodied cognition [16][17][18]. There are several ways in which embodiment is argued to support learning, generally tied to a hypothesis whereby activities help move cognition from abstract to concrete representations of a phenomenon [16].Two such notions of embodied cognition focus on how learners off-load cognitive work on to the environment and how off-line cognition is body-based [15,19]. These notions suggest physical aspects of cognition, whereby learning is supported through engaging perceptuo-motor systems [20]. Indeed, nearly all science education advocates for the use of interactive hands-on activities [21]. Through hands-on activities and demonstrations, learners connect abstract concepts to their physical environment. For example, researchers in physics education have developed embodied activities for teaching concepts of energy conservation [22]. In these activities, learners assign units of energy to physical objects (either cubes or people) [23], and then manipulate those objects to represent processes of energy transfer and dynamics. Through these concrete representations of an otherwise abstract phenomenon, learners develop their conceptual and mechanistic understandings of the phenomenon [22]. By manipulating physical objects, students can see deep features of the phenomena, allowing them to effectively integrate the features into their mental models of the phenomena [20,24].Two other notions of embodied cogn...

Using virtual reality in electrostatics instruction: The impact of training

“…This is especially apparent if the final goal is for students to answer inherently 3D questions on 2D media like paper exams and computer screens. In this sense, our results agree with other large studies like Smith et al [25] (on electrostatics), Madden et al [20,21] (on moon phases), Porter et al [26] (on magnetostatics), and Brown et al [33] (engineering) that VR-based instruction is not more effective than other media at teaching inherently 3D topics. Since interest in VR-based instruction in physics is unlikely to subside, one takeaway from our study (borne out particularly in Fig.…”

“…The growth in VR [10] content for physics should be followed by detailed studies of the impact of these visualization methods on student learning. The studies that have been performed in physics and related STEM fields report varying degrees of success [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], including many cases in which stereoscopic visualization techniques did not prove to be pedagogically more valuable than more conventional visualization methods. In this paper we will present data on the effectiveness of VR content from a new study in a large introductory electromagnetism class at Ohio State University.…”

“…Prior studies investigating the effectiveness of VR in physics and astronomy [8,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]23] have yielded mixed results. Although students given VR interventions often report being more engaged with the material, and physical immersion in VR has been shown to increase spatial awareness in search tasks [24], the advantage of VR over other media in achieving gains in specific learning outcomes is still unclear.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Immersive virtual environments and embodied agents for e-learning applications (v0.1)"

“…It is plausible that familiarity with learning material, which is known to impact learner engagement, performance, and motivation (Schönwetter et al, 2002), would have impacted our results: to combat this effect we used fabricated information to eliminate prior knowledge as a confounding variable. Thus our findings are robust, indicating there is no detriment to learning in an IVE compared to a conventional classroom setting (Madden et al, 2020).…”

Figure 3: Mean satisfaction and engagement scores with error bars representing SE, for the predictor of learning condition within immersive virtual environments (no tutor, humanoid tutor, abstract tutor).

“…It is plausible that familiarity with learning material, which is known to impact learner engagement, performance, and motivation (Schönwetter, Clifton & Perry, 2002), would have impacted our results: to combat this effect we used fabricated information to eliminate prior knowledge as a confounding variable. Thus our findings are robust, indicating there is no detriment to learning in an IVE compared to a conventional classroom setting (Madden et al, 2020).…”