Exploring the Effect of Virtual Reality on Learning in General Chemistry Students with Low Visual-Spatial Skills

Abstract

Studies have demonstrated that visual-spatial skills correlate with student performance and success in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The ability to reason with spatial information is essential for conceptual subjects like chemistry, a deep understanding of which requires dealing with the invisible world of atoms and molecules and linking microscopic properties to macroscopic observables. The link between spatial ability and chemistry achievement is well-studied and documented. The extent to which various teaching tools can help students visualize abstract physicochemical concepts is an active area of research. Virtual reality (VR) can leverage the proximity effect and create immersive learning experiences for students struggling with spatial imagery. For this reason, many VR resources have been developed to teach chemistry, yet the number of studies exploring the potential of VR to enhance spatial ability and chemistry achievement has so far been limited. Here, we report on an exploratory study conducted at a large public institution to evaluate the effect of virtual reality on learning in chemistry students with low visual-spatial skills. Spatial ability was assessed using a visual-spatial pretest. Those students who failed the test were randomized into the VR intervention and control groups. While no statistically significant difference in class performance between these two groups was observed, our data showed some improvement in the median scores in the VR intervention group compared to the control. Future studies enrolling a higher number of participants would help to make more definitive conclusions about the effect of VR on students with low visual-spatial skills.

Enhancing Learning Outcomes for Materials Crystallography via Virtual Reality: Role of User Comfort and Game Design

“…The mean quiz scores of the class increased from 7.45 ± 0.16 before VR to 8.12 ± 0.16 after VR, indicating that VR was successful in facilitating students’ learning and enhancing their academic performance. This positive finding aligns with prior research suggesting that the incorporation of VR in education can meaningfully improve quiz performance. ,, Interestingly, along with improvement in quiz scores, the mean quiz completion time decreased by 19% from 7.39 ± 0.24 min before VR to 5.98 ± 0.26 min after VR. This significant decrease in completion time suggests that VR was also effective in accelerating the time taken to recall and apply crystallography concepts.…”

Virtual Reality to Teach Students in Laboratories: A Bibliometric and Network Analysis

“…As mentioned, this is heavily influenced by the search strategy employed on the WoS. However, it is interesting to note that their connections reveal a trend in knowledge areas and fields whose investigation can be deepened like “education”, “simulation”, and “computer-based learning”. − …”

Exploring the Perception of the Effect of Three-Dimensional Interaction Feedback Types on Immersive Virtual Reality Education

“…Typical chemistry experiments are limited by many issues such as the speed of reaction, cost, and safety [30], and our VR-based teaching environments allow students to have experiences of virtual experimental operations. Also, in similar research works related to interactive feedback, although they mainly focused on virtual object recognition for selection and manipulation [31], we studied changes in virtual objects without using haptic equipment. Thus, we believe that our results will help develop a general-purpose VR system that can overcome the limitations of haptic equipment, and our findings have implications for the design of more effective VR classroom systems in terms of higher learning effectiveness.…”

“…Figure 2 shows the system configuration of the proposed virtual chemistry classroom: the participant wearing the immersive HMD can interact with a molecular model of the virtual object (e.g., an atom) using a joystick (or controller). Some elements of the educational process and evaluation methods were borrowed from recent research works on the chemistry VR classroom [30,31]. For the test conditions, 3D virtual molecular models were constructed using Unity3D, and the participating students interacted with 3D models in a given VR classroom environment.…”