'Preservice' presentation slideshows

The Use of Measurement and Neuroimaging to Examine the Learning Affordances of Virtual Reality

The presenter of this session will discuss differences in the level of hemodynamic response (used as a proxy for ‘cognitive demand’) as it relates to three different pedagogical approaches of teaching the processes of DNA extraction in life science. The first approach was using a video lecture approach. The second approach used an immersive virtual reality environment. The third approach was the use of a ‘hands-on’ laboratory in which the students engaged in a wet laboratory extraction. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRs) technology was used in this study to examine hemodynamic localization associated with each condition. Results suggest that the group using the virtual reality laboratory had a significantly higher score on the posttest compared to the laboratory group and the virtual laboratory group did not statistically significantly differ from the real-life laboratory group related to fNIR. More importantly, measures of virtual environment hemodynamic responses did not differ from those of the ‘real-life’ laboratory in either location or intensity. These results suggest that realistic virtual reality based environments and ‘real-life’ laboratory activities activate and produce similar amounts of processing and learning.

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