Students who were taught English vocab using the VR game House of Languages outperformed those who received a traditional teaching style.
(Via: CNet)
A recent study has shown that the use of a virtual reality game can enhance the learning of foreign language when compared to a regular real-life learning scenario.
By now, most people familiar with VR will understand that it's incredibly immersive, and that it offers the possibility of feeling that immersion in environments we might never have otherwise had the joy of experiencing. Because the VR-user is enthralled by an intense multi-sensory experience it would make sense to think that their engagement with the contents of the virtual world is super high.
Keeping engagement levels up is something that most if not every student has struggled with in standard educational settings to some extent. So could the use of something novel and exciting like VR help with boosting engagement, and in turn, effective learning?
This is the kind of thing researcher Mohammed Alfadil at the University of Northern Colorado was interested in looking into. Alfadil gathered together a group of 64 non-native English-speaking school students and split them into two groups. Both groups were tasked with learning a set of English vocabulary over 12 consecutive days during school-time, and were subsequently given a quiz to test that vocabulary.
The only difference was that one group was taught the vocab via traditional pen-and-paper methods, and the other group could play the VR game House of Languages to learn the vocab instead.
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Turns out that overall, the students who used the VR method demonstrated greater vocabulary acquisition than the group who received the traditional learning meth0d.
So why did this happen? Well, there are many possible explanations, although we don't know enough from this single study to conclude anything definitively. But it would make sense to think that the kids using the VR technique could learn more actively thanks to the immersive and interactive experiences involved, such as going on a virtual zoo tour. It allowed them to "learn it by living it," asAlfadil puts it, and learning tends to be more effective when the content comes across as more meaningful, and when we engage with it on a deeper level.
While it's still early days for VR as applied to educational contexts, interesting results like this are already cropping up which hold promise for the ways in which education can be administered in some contexts.
Source: Alfadil (2020)
(Via: Lux Interaction on Unsplash)[/caption]