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Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education

Environmental concerns are obstacles that all humans should confront. Accordingly, Taiwan has incorporated environmental education into its curriculum guidelines; however, difficulties have been encountered in its implementation because Taiwanese society clings to the concept of credentialism, stude...

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Autor principal: Chiang, Tosti Hsu-Cheng
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8339211/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34366950
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.608407
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author Chiang, Tosti Hsu-Cheng
author_facet Chiang, Tosti Hsu-Cheng
author_sort Chiang, Tosti Hsu-Cheng
collection PubMed
description Environmental concerns are obstacles that all humans should confront. Accordingly, Taiwan has incorporated environmental education into its curriculum guidelines; however, difficulties have been encountered in its implementation because Taiwanese society clings to the concept of credentialism, students cannot focus in class, and course content is too abstract. Virtual reality (VR) techniques have been incorporated into the field of education for years; because they can increase the interestingness of learning and also concretely present matters through gamification, the present study applied VR techniques to resolve the aforementioned difficulties. VR can build environments and situations that would be impossible to visit in the real world, e.g., travel inside a human body, or the physically impossible—the surface of Mars. The aim was to increase students’ immersion in class would generate empathy toward the natural environment and perform actual behaviors to protect it. In terms of the experimental design, gender and teaching methods were defined as independent variables, and observation and questionnaires were conducted and applied to examine students’ immersion, empathy, and behaviors after learning. Participants in the experimental group watched a 3D video through a semi-immersive VR device, whereas those in the control group watched an ordinary video accompanied by an explanation from the teacher. The numbers of male and female students were equally allocated, and the learning outcomes of the two groups were further examined. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance test was conducted to examine the influences of 2(genders) × 2(teaching methods) on students’ immersion, empathy, and actual behaviors and also mainly to inspect whether the differences between genders and teaching methods resulted in a direct influence or interaction. The experimental results revealed that the effectiveness of the application of VR techniques is affected by gender; female students presented more favorable performance in both empathy and actual behaviors. In brief, VR techniques can generally enhance students’ learning outcomes; however, limitations such as the cost of VR devices and material designs should also be considered.
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spelling pubmed-83392112021-08-06 Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education Chiang, Tosti Hsu-Cheng Front Psychol Psychology Environmental concerns are obstacles that all humans should confront. Accordingly, Taiwan has incorporated environmental education into its curriculum guidelines; however, difficulties have been encountered in its implementation because Taiwanese society clings to the concept of credentialism, students cannot focus in class, and course content is too abstract. Virtual reality (VR) techniques have been incorporated into the field of education for years; because they can increase the interestingness of learning and also concretely present matters through gamification, the present study applied VR techniques to resolve the aforementioned difficulties. VR can build environments and situations that would be impossible to visit in the real world, e.g., travel inside a human body, or the physically impossible—the surface of Mars. The aim was to increase students’ immersion in class would generate empathy toward the natural environment and perform actual behaviors to protect it. In terms of the experimental design, gender and teaching methods were defined as independent variables, and observation and questionnaires were conducted and applied to examine students’ immersion, empathy, and behaviors after learning. Participants in the experimental group watched a 3D video through a semi-immersive VR device, whereas those in the control group watched an ordinary video accompanied by an explanation from the teacher. The numbers of male and female students were equally allocated, and the learning outcomes of the two groups were further examined. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance test was conducted to examine the influences of 2(genders) × 2(teaching methods) on students’ immersion, empathy, and actual behaviors and also mainly to inspect whether the differences between genders and teaching methods resulted in a direct influence or interaction. The experimental results revealed that the effectiveness of the application of VR techniques is affected by gender; female students presented more favorable performance in both empathy and actual behaviors. In brief, VR techniques can generally enhance students’ learning outcomes; however, limitations such as the cost of VR devices and material designs should also be considered. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-07-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8339211/ /pubmed/34366950 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.608407 Text en Copyright © 2021 Chiang. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Chiang, Tosti Hsu-Cheng
Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education
title Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education
title_full Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education
title_fullStr Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education
title_full_unstemmed Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education
title_short Investigating Effects of Interactive Virtual Reality Games and Gender on Immersion, Empathy and Behavior Into Environmental Education
title_sort investigating effects of interactive virtual reality games and gender on immersion, empathy and behavior into environmental education
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8339211/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34366950
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.608407
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