Promoting Learning, Agency, and Motivation in STEM Classrooms with Virtual Reality Field Trips

Abstract

Traditional schooling often lacks the experiences that enable learners to explore authentic science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) problems and contexts. The decontextualized nature of the classroom has dire consequences for STEM education, ultimately failing to engage many young people. Virtual reality’s (VR) highly immersive characteristics can foster novel embodied interaction with digital environments, making it a promising technology for situating learning in the contexts and practices of STEM professionals. This dissertation demonstrates the affordances and limitations of VR field trips to facilitate such authentically situated learning in STEM classrooms by assessing how they support and hinder student learning, motivation, and sense of agency. In doing so, it addresses the need for more research on the multidimensional and longitudinal impact of VR in classroom instruction. This dissertation studied an implementation of four VR field trips in high school engineering classes, which aimed to provide students rich contexts to observe and participate in the practices of scientists. The design-based research utilized a mixed-methods analysis reported across three studies. The first study found that the VR field trips helped students understand the complexity of the environments and scientific work, yet presented challenges due to learners’ high cognitive load. Principles for VR learning design are presented, including how to scaffold learning with multiple types of media and give students ample time to process their learning. The second study investigated student sense of agency during the VR field trips. It identified a multidimensional structure, with distinctions between student agency over learning, attention, and actions. These multiple dimensions of agency have varied associations with different types of VR media and student identities. Finally, the third study found that VR field trips can engage affective dimensions of STEM learning by evoking enjoyment, awe, fear, and curiosity. However, the study did not find evidence of changes in motivational dimensions of STEM learning including self-efficacy and STEM identity. Each of these studies contributes to a holistic picture of how VR field trips facilitate authentically situated learning. Together, they help address the question of how VR can be a tool to improve STEM education through bringing rich contexts and the practices of scientists into classroom instruction.