Systematic Review of NSF Virtual Reality for Education and Training Funded Projects: Implications for Researchers

Abstract

While nearly a quarter of federally funded academic research in the United States is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), approximately 78% of proposals to NSF are not funded.  This systematic review of NSF-funded projects that integrate virtual reality for education and training offers direction to advance research initiatives including virtual reality. Out of 605 abstracts, 160 projects funded between 2015-2022 met the inclusion criteria. Projects were coded by learning context, learning domain, subject, type of VR use, and special populations. This manuscript provides explanations about the larger categories of funded projects and provides justification for future research opportunities. This provides stakeholders insight into the shifting trends in context, learning domains, and content areas funded by NSF toward the integration of virtual reality into education and training. Among these insights, higher education contexts comprise the largest category of NSF-funded VR projects with an emphasis on engineering, computer science, and data science contexts.  The most salient findings of the review of abstracts was that a majority of funded projects indicated a focus on learning outcomes in the cognitive domain (140), as opposed to the psychomotor domain (57) or affective domain (31).  This is of particular interest, given the unique affordances of Virtual Reality. If VR is “the ultimate empathy machine” and the immersive nature of “learning by doing” lends itself to interactive experiences, it is likely that many VR researchers are missing out on the advantages of the most powerful aspects of the medium when leaving psychomotor skills out of their design.