Immersive Virtual Reality as Educational Resource

Virtual Reality (VR) is a powerful tool as it allows individuals to experience a real-life situation by means of technological devices which can replicate real-life elements within immersive environments (Parsons, 2015). When referring to VR, we refer to a technology within which people are embedded in a 3D environment, which they can easily and freely interact with, by means of specific oculus and headsets. VR is considered better than other 3D environments, like 360-degree videos and augmented reality, which represent a lower level of presence and immersion experienced by people (Bowman & McMahan, 2007). As a powerful tool, an increasing interest in using VR within school and educational context is due to the increasing multidisciplinarity this tool is achieving over the years (Adams Becker et al., 2017). Moreover, as a direct consequence of the increasing usability and feasibility, VR devices are becoming less expensive and, consequently, more affordable for everyone, including school context (Brown, McCormack, Reeves, Brooks, & Grajek, 2020). Although VR use in school is still not widely affirmed and an overall agreement about its usefulness and safety has not been found yet, research on educational psychology has already demonstrated a wide range of positive implications (Wu, Yu, & Gu, 2020). Positive implications of VR use in students can be mainly explained by the constructivism theory by Piaget (1974), who stated that people learn better by shaping their personal environment, therefore creating their own knowledge instead of receiving external inputs. By means of VR, children explore and shape the environment by themselves, creating an active learning environment that will be the results of their manipulation (Persky & Eccleston, 2011). Basing on the constructivism theory, we can also assume that students’ internal motivation increases thanks to the active participation provided by VR, as well as their way to think and even more advance thinking styles and modalities, like critical, abstract and divergent thinking (Sowndararajan, Wang, & Bowman, 2008). The positive implications mentioned before are due firstly to the VR level of presence and immersion, allowing students to feel engaged in the tasks and activities they carry out into the VR environment (Villena-Taranilla et al., 2022). When referring to presence and immersion, the former refers to the feeling of being involved within that specific situation in that specific environment, while the latest refers to the level of reality perceived. Thanks to these two features, students can experience within VR environment a level of self-engagement they could not ever experience during a theoretical lecture or activity. As they would be the main actors of their activities interacting in first person with the virtual learning environment, they can consequently feel a higher interests in those tasks they carry out within the VR environment (Di Natale et al., 2020). Therefore, we can assume that the interaction with a real environment, the high quality of realism provided by this environment, and the active control experienced by students, are all powerful strength to promote the use of VR in schools. In this regard, research on educational psychology has demonstrated that providing learning contents by VR lead students to elicit positive emotions because of the higher level of active participation and engagement, developing a general positive attitude towards the learning contents (Chirico, Ferrise, Cordella, & Gaggioli, 2018). As it is widely demonstrated that the more positive emotions felt during the learning process, the higher learning outcomes will be, especially knowledge transfer, knowledge retention, and tasks engagement, we can confirm that VR, by eliciting positive emotions in students, predicts higher learning outcomes as well (Cheng & Tsai, 2019). Moreover, as literature widely confirms that exploration, active participation, and engagement are key elements of learning processes, we can summarize that VR, by including these elements, can provide better learning processes (Ai-Lim Lee, Wong, & Fung, 2010). Among the positive outcomes found, research has shown that the use of VR in school improve explorative behaviors, as students have to actively explore their virtual environment, but also contents knowledge and understanding, as students have shown to learn better school contents using (Alalwan, et al., 2020) VR. By providing a better learning experience, VR improve also academic performance, interest, and motivation (Calvert & Abadia, 2020). Moreover, as VR implies the stimulation of multiple sensorial channels, being a 3D experience, students’ brains will receive a higher cognitive stimulation as well. Thanks to this stimulation, several cognitive skills like attention, visualization, collaborative learning, and other skills can be improved by using VR (Araiza-Alba, Keane, & Kaufman, 2022). Basing on the international literature available, we can assume that the use of VR at school is also high recommended by both primary and secondary school teachers and students, who have showed a positive attitude towards VR usefulness (Mukasheva, Kornilov, Beisembayev, Soroko, Sarsimbayeva, & Omirzakova, 2023). Among its quality, VR users at school have emphasized the gamification of learning contents, allowing students to play and manipulate them in a more enjoyable way and to feel actively engaged into learning tasks. Moreover, VR environments and technologies are apparently easy to use after a brief orientation time, therefore they do not need long training periods, consequently leading students to spend less cognitive resources than those ones they are required to spend usually in facing school tasks and activities. Evidence has shown a positive attitude towards VR use from teachers as well, who consider themselves as the learning coordinators, guiding students through the virtual environments and activities, explaining the contents they will encounter and the tasks they will face by means of VR. Nevertheless, previous research has also shown some limitations and problems related to the use of VR at school (Southgate, et al., 2019). The main obstacles to VR use at school are school features and policies: a lot of times school are not willing to spend money and resources in advanced technologies or in suitable physical spaces in which these technologies can be inserted; a lot of school do not have financial resources either, making VR costs unaffordable. Although VR technologies have become cheaper over the time, VR contents and environments are still expensive, and the equipment prices increase if we take in account that equipment should be available for all the school users. Moreover, another issue refers to teachers skills and time: teachers often claim to not be trained about the use of these advanced technologies within their daily work, and, subsequently, they cannot be skilled towards them, provoking difficulties in dealing with VR; sometimes teachers also claim to not have enough time within their daily lectures for VR inclusion, because school programs and activities already steal them a lot of time. Regarding the limitations referred to VR use by students, on the one hand teachers sometimes have noticed that students’ attention is not totally focused on the learning content because they easily fall under the novelty effect, being too enthusiastic for the quality of the tool used, ignoring consequently the content provided by the tool. On the other hand, teachers claims also that, at the opposite, learning contents are too specific and, consequently, students cannot learn the same amount of knowledge they would learn by means of textbooks, making the learning process and the subjects milestones slower as well. A last ethical limitation is due to both physical and psychological discomfort that may occur after the use of VR, especially in children (like nausea and headache), but these discomforts’ causes were not exactly identified yet, although in the most cases they are due to a low quality of VR contents or a bad and incorrect use of these technologies. In order to summarize all these information, we can assume that VR is a powerful resource provided that it is used in an appropriate way by appropriate equipment and keeping always a pedagogical meaning inside by means of teaching material and methods and, surely, by means of the mediation and presence of teachers, through which children avoid feeling isolation and imbalance with the real word. Although the limitations listed before, VR keeps anyway a high added value and benefits within educational contexts. Among the usefulness reported by literature, VR technologies has been most used in teaching History, STEM subjects (especially science), Languages and Art (Aznar, Romero, & Rodríguez, 2018). However, apart from the didactic use, VR has been involved within school training programs as well, addressed both to teachers and students (Reiners, Wood, & Bastiaens, 2018). About teachers’ training programs, VR has been widely used in order to improve teachers’ classroom management, teaching skills, emotions understanding, feedback use and nonverbal language (Alonso, et al., 2021). By means of VR within virtual classroom environments, teachers can assess their skills in a more realistic way, obtaining more useful feedback and achieving higher outcomes in improving themselves. With regard to students’ training programs, they have been carried out in order to improve several skills, among which social skills (Zhou, & Kalota, 2020). Analyzing deeper the interventions addressed to students’ improvement of social skills, they are based on the theorical assumption that social interaction leads to enjoyment and, consequently, as we have already explained before, they lead indirectly to higher learning outcomes as well (Choi and Kim, 2004). Another assumption is that positive peer interactions develop higher cognitive skills like problem solving and decision making by means of discussing ideas and exchanging points of views (Vygotsky, 1978). Therefore, training programs addressed to students’ social skills are fundamental in order to improve their social relationships at school and, consequently, their learning outcomes as well. Among the social skills improved by means of VR training programs, literature refers to peer interaction, collaborative learning, co-active participation and shared educational activities, communication and discussion among peers (Zhou, & Kalota, 2020). However, all these skills have been improved by means of VR environments in which students could meet their real peers inside the virtual environment. At the current state of art, no VR training program without the involvement of other real actors has been implemented yet. Moreover, among the social skills reported by literature, the improving of peer inclusion, decreasing consequently peer exclusion, is still missing. Because of the gap mentioned before, we are developing a new VR paradigm within which students will be able to experience peer exclusion and inclusion, in order to plan future interventions addressed to these specific social skills. The basic assumption behind this paradigm is that students excluded by their peers or group of peers, by eliciting negative emotions, show a negative cognitive and, consequently, academic performance. Vice versa, students with a high feeling of acceptance and inclusion by their peers or peers group show a more positive attitude because of the high social interactions and relationship within the school environment, and this will lead to better cognitive functions and learning outcomes. Therefore, the 3D paradigm we are developing will be able to simulate both a peer exclusion and a peer inclusion situation within school context: students will be immersed in a virtual classroom environment within which they will seat in a desk surrounded by other students (that are pretending to be real students), discussing all together about a school task. Every time the student will approach to the other students, they will actively ignore or reply to him, provoking an exclusion or inclusion dynamic, depending on the modality, and, consequently, an exclusion or inclusion feeling in the participant. We are willing to use this paradigm firstly to understand how peer exclusion and inclusion dynamics work at school and their relationships with other important learning components, and, subsequently, in order to plan future interventions for school context.