Investigating the process of learning with desktop virtual reality: A structural equation modeling approach
Section snippets
Background
The education sector is currently experiencing an upsurge in the use of technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and interactive simulations for teaching and enriching students' educational experiences. According to Burbules (2006, p. 37) VR can be defined as “a computer-mediated simulation that is three-dimensional, multisensory, and interactive, so that the user's experience is “as if” inhabiting and acting within an external environment”. Depending on the system used, VR simulations may
Sample
The sample consisted of 199 (120 females and 79 males) first-year undergraduate students with a major in medicine from a large European University. The entire first year class of 300 students were contacted to participate in the study; however only those who gave permission to use the responses for research purposes were included in this study.
Procedures
The simulation session was a part of a mandatory medical genetics course that the students attended. The session lasted for three hours and was conducted
Results
A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the fit of the hypothesized relationship between the constructs in the a priori model shown in Fig. 1. This hypothesized model nearly reached an acceptable fit (RMSEA = 0.063, CFI = 0.957, TLI = 0.952), but contained several non-significant paths which were deleted by an iterative procedure. Each of these paths were evaluated and removed one at a time based on the greatest misfit until all of the remaining paths were significant. This
Empirical contributions
The major empirical contribution of this paper is the finding that there are two paths that lead to learning with desktop VR when measures of pre-to post-test change are used as dependent variables. These are labeled the affective and the cognitive paths, and provide a framework by which learning in VR can be investigated.
Conclusions
Through the use of SEM, the present study tested a model based on previous work in the field of learning with VR. This resulted in a simplified model with two general paths by which the desktop VR simulation led to increased learning; an affective path in which presence was the key psychological variable; and a cognitive path with cognitive benefits as the key psychological variable. Furthermore, the influence of presence and cognitive benefits on the process of learning in VR was underscored
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Anne Nørremølle, Ainara Lopez Cordoba, Julie Wulff, Jakob Wandall as well as all of the teachers at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen who helped collect data for this study. We would also like to thank all of the employees at Labster who helped us develop and implement the Cytogenetics simulation in this study. This research was supported by Innovation Fund Denmark.
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