Immersive Virtual Reality Training to Enhance Procedural Knowledge Retention

Jun Zhang, Purdue University

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has brought many new opportunities for training researchers and students. In the immersive VR environment, trainees can practice tasks which are similar to what they will perform in a physical environment. By repeating the training, trainees will finally get themselves familiar with concepts and operations related to a specific device. Virtual reality technology has several advantages for training researchers or students, such as reducing the cost, increasing the flexibility of the training, as well as protecting the trainees from any potential risk. However, learning from the VR scenario should meet several requirements: first, trainees should indeed learn the expected learning objectives from the virtual training; second, trainees should be able to transfer the knowledge which trainees gained from virtual training to physical scenario; third, trainees should remember these skills well enough compared with the traditional training method. In the traditional training environment, trainees usually follow verbal instructions (lecture) or visual instructions (video tutorial, job manual) as certain training methods. For this research study, we not only tested how much procedural knowledge the trainees could learn from the VR training compared with traditional media training (video plus instruction manual), we also specifically focused on how well the knowledge could retain in a certain amount of time. The finding of this study shows that VR training can help trainees learn procedural knowledge, and also shows that VR training can help enhance procedural knowledge retention in terms of recall error. However, we did not find any significant difference in recall time between VR training group and traditional media training group.

Degree

M.Sc.

Advisors

Chen, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Design|Cognitive psychology|Health education|Information Technology|Medicine|Nursing|Ophthalmology|Pedagogy|Psychology|Surgery

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