Drawing as reflection strategy for immersive virtual reality learning to enhance students’ science outcome

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology has a great potentiality in providing high presence and in-time interactions to simulate real learning situations by presenting 3D visualization to enhance the effectiveness of learning about biology, especially genetics topics which on a submicroscopic level including genes, chromosomes, and DNAs are abstract and cannot be directly perceived or touched. In this study, different types of media learning environments, including traditional PC-slides and IVR, such as VR-game, which were employed for experiential learning of science courses with 109 students in the middle school. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of reflection strategy and type of media on participants’ cognitive outcomes. Significant interaction between media and methods illustrated the reflection strategy enhanced learners' cognitive performance through immersive VR learning environments (IVREs), but not traditional PC-slides. By using the drawing method, the VR-game made students the most engaged in learning and focus on the key points of important concepts; non-reflection learners focused on games and their learning was easily disturbed. It was concluded that the immersive virtual reality with the specific reflection method was effective in increasing learning performance and the drawing as a generative learning strategy indeed reduced the external cognitive load of learning and promoted the effectiveness of cognitive processing.