Education

Immersive virtual environments offer immense potential as educational tools. For example, using virtual environments, we can:

1) model a variety of scientific systems
2) recreate historical events and sites
3) create interactive multi-user virtual classrooms that may be attended by anyone in the world.

By applying learning principles developed by cognitive and educational psychologists, our goals are to study how humans learn in virtual environments and how to design virtual environments that maximize learning potential.

Current Projects:

The goal of Roxana Moreno's and Rich Mayer's current research is to determine which factors of an instructional virtual environment contribute most to an individual's ability to build useful mental models of their experience in that environment. Building on previous cognitive research and theory in desktop multimedia, they are currently targeting vocal instruction, for example, as being more helpful to constructivist learning than textual instruction. Furthermore, they are investigating the personalization effect, which suggests that instruction spoken from a conversation-style voice is retained better than instruction spoken from formal voicing. In order to test this theory, they have developed an immersive environment in which students will learn, across varying modalities, a lesson in environmental science, and then are tested on what they have been presented.

A second issue is to determine the cognitive effects of presenting highly visible pedagogical agents who share the virtual world with the student. A third issue, consists of investigating the role of agents' guidance in constructivist virtual environments by comparing different levels of exploration ranging from pure discovery, where the learner is free to explore the VR environment on his own, to guided discovery, where the learner's exploration is guided by the computerized mentor. More generally, Moreno and Mayer are interested in whether the feeling of being in the simulated environment (presence) can result in a qualitatively different learning outcome than learning in non-immersive environments. With this goal, they intend to test if the set of cognitive principles that have arisen from their prior studies in desktop multimedia learning, such as the contiguity and coherence principles, can be extended to virtual environments.