Evaluating Learning Outcomes of Virtual Reality Applications in Education: A Proposal for Digital Cultural Heritage

The surge of Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) applications is getting growing attention among researchers and practitioners. The recent literature demonstrates its benefits when used for education purposes, since virtual immersion yields promising results for learning. Leveraging this trend, within the so called “digital didactics”, the need to gauge VR’s effectiveness in the didactic field has become paramount; so far, a method to connect traditional evaluation strategies to novel VR-based learning is still broadly missing. This paper investigates the problem of quantifying the learning outcomes and proposes a new didactic evaluation method for the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) learning. This research, conducted in a higher education institute, proposes three new Key Performance Indicators, referring to Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (RBT): Mnemonic (M), Transversal (T), and Disciplinary (D). A questionnaire was administered by the same teacher who holds the course, to evaluate how well the application communicated information. The participants have been subdivided into two groups with the same knowledge base. The first group (1ACAT) that represents the “VR group” used the app at home to deepen their subject studies; while the second group (1AGR) that represents the “control group” consulted and studied the app only before the test. The results have demonstrated that the “control group” has a greater ability to support purely mnemonic topics (1ACAT 46.9%, 1AGR 53.1%), such as dates and simple definitions. The skills reached by the “VR group” attest to both transveral (1ACAT 52.9%, 1AGR 47.1%) and disciplinary (1ACAT 52.5%, 1AGR 47.5%) knowledge. These results validate the use of VR in teaching, demonstrating both experiential value and student involvement, but even confirming the compensatory function of VR if compared with the irreplaceable role of teachers in guiding learners to learn.