Vulnerable viewers of valid vistas? Assessing student performance when the perception of presence is increased in a virtual learning environment, Open University internal paper

• Main Authors: Denise Whitelock, Anne Jelfs
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1999
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.529.3745; http://www.temple.edu/ispr/prev_conferences/proceedings/98-99-2000/2000/Whitelock and Jelfs.pdf

This paper investigates some of the factors in virtual environments that promote an increased sense of presence. One of the advantages of building a virtual reality system is to allow students to enter different worlds which in this particular instance is the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and to experience a real sense of "being there". However, does this enhanced sense of presence facilitate conceptual understanding? An experiment was undertaken where Sixth Form (Year 12) pupils interacted with a desk top system that took them to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ridge. The students who worked in an enhanced presence environment were able to navigate and complete a number of tasks using the virtual reality environment more easily than those who did not use the enhanced presence version of the software. Interestingly the cognitive changes scores did not follow this pattern and students did not seem to learn as much with the enhanced presence environment. This study provides some benchmark data about theroles of presence with effect to cognitive processing tasks in virtual environments.