Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Simulations on Basic Science Process Skills of School Students

Abstract

Building strong science process skills is really important because it helps students in school to watch, sort, measure, guess, plan, and share information about science. Traditional teaching in the classroom often doesn't give students much chance to work with the idea-based and hands-on parts of science. Using VR simulations is one way to make learning better by letting students interact and get deeply involved. This study looks into how well VR simulations can help VIII standard students develop their science process skills in school. The experiment utilized quasi-experimental research design with pre-test and post-test for the two groups. This design included 64 eighth graders who were equally divided into two groups consisting of 32 participants each. While the first group was taught through virtual reality simulation created by the researcher, the other group was taught using traditional teaching methods. The level of comprehension of basic science skills including observation, classification, measurement, inference, prediction, and communication was measured via test with 48 questions. The comparison was performed using statistical analysis to determine differences between the two groups and within them. The effect size was measured using Cohen’s d. Results from the pre-test indicated the absence of a significant difference between those participants who were taught using VR technology and those who were not (t = 0.059, p = .953).The participants who were not taught using VR technology did not demonstrate any significant changes from the pre-test to the post-test (t = 0.065, df = 30, p = .949; Cohen's d = 0.012), whereas the group of participants who were exposed to VR demonstrated significant improvement as a result of using the technology (t = 9.737, df = 30, p < .001; Cohen's d = 1.75).At the same time, results from the post-test indicated significant differences between the two groups (t = 8.058, df = 30, p < .001; Cohen's d = 2.02).Thus, the results suggest that the utilization of VR simulations can significantly facilitate learning of basic skills in science and can become an efficient tool for supporting standard science courses. Further studies are required with larger samples, longer periods of using the technology and measures of retention.