How does students having additional preparation material prior to their laboratories effect student confidence and interest?
Armstrong, Lee (2024) Supervisors: Dr Tim Kinnear, Dr Edd Pitt. Master of Science (MSc) thesis, University of Kent.
Abstract
Social virtual reality shows promise in the field of physics education and higher education more generally, but it is unclear how effective it is compared to other teaching methods.
This study investigates the effect of social virtual reality and pre-recorded videos as extra pre-laboratory material in addition to lab-scripts on student confidence and interest.
It was found that the pre-lab video material leads to overwhelmingly more self-reported student confidence and interest compared to the virtual reality experience in their respective labs, this is likely to be because the VR experience did not have any guidance leading to the students not gaining anything from it.
This study also attempted to evaluate if more active pre-lab preparation materials were more effective at increasing student confidence and interest but the results were inconclusive due to the difficulty of comparing the video and VR labs results fairly. The unfairness came from the limited time to create VR labs and videos for both labs, instead it was only possible to make one for each therefore it was very difficult to compare.
The design choices for putting together the virtual environments do make quite a difference, this study shows that you can design environments to help students unknowingly perform particular productive behaviours. For example putting two pieces of related equipment near each other but with enough distance that it requires two people to operate both, therefore this incentives teamwork.
Finally it was seen that students get quite confused with the required lab-scripts provided in the lab module due to their varied designs.
Further research is needed which could include working out which types of virtual environments work the best for teaching, and looking into if the quality of editing in video materials makes a difference to their usefulness.