Can virtual reality help multilingual students better understand scientific concepts?

this story originally appeared on the University of Georgia site and is republished here with permission.

Key points:

Multilingual students face unique challenges that can affect their performance in school. New teaching methods can help close this gap, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

In the United States, English is the primary language used in classrooms. Schools also tend to rely on oral communication to teach and written exams to assess learning.

That can make it difficult for multilingual students to express themselves. This is especially true in science classes, with their specific terms and complex sentence structures.

That's why a UGA researcher developed an immersive virtual reality game to communicate scientific concepts to students in new ways.

Students were tested before and after playing the game, either on a desktop computer or via immersive virtual reality, and researchers compared their scores to see if the game helped students better understand the material.

All students' scores improved after playing the game, and the multilingual students performed as well as their English-speaking peers.

Visual cues and body movements provide alternative ways to learn concepts.

The virtual reality game used visual, audio, and body movements to give students multiple ways to learn and express their knowledge about a topic. Researchers referred to this as multimodal meaning making, or using various forms of communication to process and transmit information.

The study suggests that being able to construct meaning from multiple methods is critical for multilingual learners.

“Virtual reality offers meaning-making processes or meaning-making opportunities that go beyond simple verbal communications,” he said. ai-chu-elisha-ding/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>ai Chu Elisha Dinglead author of the study and assistant professor at UGA Mary Frances College of Early Education.

“The multilingual students did quite well because they got the support they needed and had different ways of expressing their understanding beyond the typical ways they did in the science classroom.”

Multilingual Students Could Benefit from Multiple Ways to Communicate

Outside of the classroom, people use more than their words to communicate. Hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language impart their own meaning in interactions.

These non-verbal cues are often overlooked in schools.

“In the American education system, students communicate their ideas primarily through English,” Ding said. “Classroom interactions are also very verbal, meaning that students and teachers express themselves through written language or orally. “That creates a lot of barriers for multilingual students.”

Virtual reality can help overcome those barriers by helping to communicate ideas visually instead of just words.

Virtual reality can add non-verbal cues to lessons

The lead researcher and her colleagues worked with a high school science teacher and an ESL teacher to develop a virtual reality game with content taught in science classes. The game and lessons are designed to help students learn science and develop their language skills at the same time. The study included 97 seventh-grade students at an urban high school in Indiana.

The researchers developed the game in two modes: one in a virtual reality headset and another on a desktop computer.

The headset game focused on visual and auditory cues to provide feedback and allowed students to interact with the virtual environment around them. The desktop game relied more on text to convey information and was designed to be less immersive.

Students were then tested on their knowledge of the material covered in the games, how they made connections between the concepts introduced, and how they translated their thoughts into writing.

All students saw an improvement in their test scores. Multilingual students also performed as well as English-only students. Additionally, students who played the immersive virtual reality game improved their test scores significantly more than students who played the desktop game.

Observation is fundamental in science, and the virtual reality game puts students in an environment where they can study a topic immersively, according to the researchers. Desktop mode wasn't able to provide the same type of experience, which explains why those students didn't do as well.

While virtual reality games are not available in all classrooms, Ding emphasized that students can still benefit from teachers adopting new teaching methods.

“Teachers can do a lot of different things to make this type of nonverbal communication happen more in classrooms,” Ding said. “One of the key takeaways from the study is that teachers need to pay close attention to using visuals and hand gestures to help students process information.”

This study was published in Learning and Instruction and was co-authored by Eunkyoung Elaine Cha, a doctoral student in the Department of Workforce Education and Instructional technology at UGA. The study was funded by Ball State University through a Creative Teaching Grant.