Students learn better in virtual reality environments with narrated presentation, but their learning is not affected by high levels of immersion, study says

A study conducted at the University of California in Santa Barbara called "Learning Science in Virtual Reality Multimedia Environments: Role of Methods and Media," by Roxana Moreno and Richard E. Mayer, found that students learned better with a narrated presentation rather than an on-screen text presentation.

Source: http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/
Psychology/images/VR.jpg

The students scored higher on retention, transfer, and program ratings in the narrative condition, and the narrative and text condition than in the text condition, the study said.

The 2002 study also found high ratings of presence in high-immersion environments. However, this high level of engagement, or involvement, did not affect students' performance on retention, transfer, or program ratings, the study said.

A brief overview of the study

The participants (college students at the University of California in Santa Barbara) in the study learned about botany through a multimedia game.

The researchers "developed a version of Design-A-Plant...that was delivered using a head-mounted display (HMD) and earphones. In the game, the students would travel to a made-up planet that had certain climate conditions. They had to create a plant that would be able to survive on the planet.

The students received feedback through a spoken explanation, an identical on-screen explanation, or both a spoken and identical on-screen explanation.

For example, a medium gives instructions asking "the student to design the roots that are

appropriate for those conditions." The medium then "gives feedback on students’ choice of the root."

In the experiment, students received the spoken or identical on-screen explanations via media, including a desktop display, a HMD while sitting, or a HMD while walking. The explanations were presented as just narration, just text, or both narration and text, while at a desktop display or using a HMD.

A) Desktop display, B) semi-immersive environment (HMD while sitting),
C) high-immersive environment (HMD while walking). Source:
journal.frontiersin.org

Learning was measured by retention, transfer, and program rating. Moreno and Mayer define these three factors:

• retention -> "students...write down all they can remember about the kind of roots, stems, and leaves"
• transfer -> "students...solve problems they have not previously encountered"
• program rating -> "students...rate their ease of learning and other features of their learning task"

Moreno and Mayer also define immersion:

• immersion -> "the extent to which computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid illusion of reality to the senses of a human participant"

Narrative presentation, and narrative and text presentation is more effective and efficient for students' learning than text presentation.

Source: http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/
wp-content/uploads/2009/01/mayer-graph-audio2.jpg

The researchers predicted before experimentation that the students would learn "more deeply when words were presented as narration rather than as on-screen text. The findings from the experiment supported this hypothesis. 

The researchers mentioned that this finding was "consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning." This theory suggests that "visual information...can become overloaded when it must process incoming graphics and printed text."

The graph on the right shows us that "[l]earners can only process one thing visually at a time. If they're reading the text, they can't look at the graphics simultaneously. However, presenting the text as audio narration let's learners process it with their ears, and frees their eyes to focus on the graphic being explained."

Therefore, students have "better retention [and] achieve better transfer when material...when material is communicated by speech rather than on-screen text."

Media (e.g., desktop display, head-mounted display) has an effect on presence, but it does not affect students' learning.

The researchers predicted before experimentation that the students would either have "better retention, transfer, and rating scores for high-immersion environment than for low-immersion environment" or "poorer retention, transfer, and rating scores for high-immersion environment than for low-immersion environment."

The thought by the researchers, here, was that "students who learn in more immersive conditions are predicted to give higher presence ratings (i.e., highest ratings for [HMD while walking] followed by [HMD while sitting] and lowest ratings for [desktop display])." As a result, "the higher sense of presence could cause students to work harder to learn the material [hence]...high scores on retention, transfer, and program ratings.

On the other hand, "[a]n alternative version of this view is that learners will give higher ratings on presence to more immersive learning conditions but that...highly immersive environments may overload the learner."

As a result, the study showed that there was an effect on presence. The researchers mentioned that students had strong feelings of "being there" in the more immersive environments, like a head-mounted display, rather than in less immersive environments, such as a desktop display, but the higher levels of engagement did not increase or decrease learning, proving both hypotheses wrong.

Students performed equally well receiving narration presentation in both high- and low-immersion environments. 

The researchers also predicted before experimentation that the students would have "better retention, transfer, and rating performance...with narration than...with on-screen text in high-immersion environment but not in low-immersion environment." The findings from the experiment did not support this hypothesis. 

The researchers found that narration presentation, and narration and text presentation was more effective and efficient than text presentation for desktop display and head-mounted display.

"Apparently, the methods we used—such as the use of narration rather than text—were supported equally well in the high- and low-immersion environments," the researchers wrote.

They did find that there wasn't much of a difference between the narration presentation, and the narration and text presentation. The researchers interpreted this as students being more "inclined to attend to the narration alone because of the experiential mode of virtual reality environments."

Limitations in the study

The researchers mention that there is little research out there on this topic. They concluded, though, that their study was "limited by the nature of the learning materials, by participants’ familiarity with the technology, and by the quality of the [virtual reality] experiences."

The researchers also pointed out that "[i]n the future, it is more likely to expect learning differences as a function of immersion as people gain familiarity with these newer technologies." They say that   "[m]ore research is needed to explore the circumstances under which presence may enhance learning."