Extended Abstract—The Impact of Guidance on Learning and Agency in a Virtual Reality Game for STEM Education

Abstract

Educational research has long debated the benefits of structuring learners’ experience through direct guidance versus allowing learners to engage in an unguided process of discovery. Educational virtual reality (VR) experiences require designers to confront this question. VR environments can be open-ended, allowing for a considerable amount of agency that either benefits learning or overwhelms the learner with stimuli. This extended abstract describes a work in progress to assess the impact of direct guidance on learning and agency in an open-ended STEM education VR game. The game was built in Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’, a platform for social and self-directed experiences that is widely accessible on the Quest line of headsets. Titled ‘Virtual Excursions for Science Learning (VESL)’, the multiplayer game situates learners in the role of scientists on a research cruise to study plankton. In this study, we have pairs of university students play the game either unguided or with a researcher guiding their virtual excursion. We are assessing the impact of these two conditions on learners’ content knowledge gains, retention of research procedures, sense of agency and changes in their STEM interest and identity.