Session Information
16 SES 02 A, Teacher Education
Paper Session
Contribution
This conference presentation aims to contribute to the further development of the implementation and research of Virtual Reality (VR) practices in higher education. The study's impetus is the knowledge gap of the teacher-educator perspective in Virtual Reality practices. Recent review studies regarding VR practices in teacher education indicate that researchers have focused on identifying factors and prerequisites to successfully implement VR in higher education, such as the right technological equipment and sufficient ICT support (Amhag et al., 2019; Kavanagh et al., 2017; McGarr, 2020; Ungar & Baruch, 2016). In addition, the review studies reported measurements of student experiences with VR applications and their effects on students’ skills and knowledge. Interestingly, none of the studies included in the review studies addressed or covered the perspective of the teacher-educator. A possible explanation for the lack of the teacher-educator perspective could be that the VR applications were delivered by the initiators and designers of the VR application (Pomerantz, 2019), instead of an ecologically valid setting of a teacher-educator implementing the VR application.
To strengthen the implementation of VR practices in higher education, we argue that the perspectives and experiences of teacher-educators should be included in the evaluation of VR curriculum implementations. This is a perspective that is missing in contemporary literature.
To address this knowledge gap and include the teacher-educator perspective, the current study follows the implementation of the VR-kindergarten curriculum “Keeping Order in a Virtual Reality Kindergarten Classroom” (Mouw & Fokkens-Bruinsma, 2022) at three Dutch universities of applied sciences. The VR-kindergarten curriculum is designed by two educational scientists who teach at teacher-training programs to support pre-service teachers in developing kindergarten-specific classroom management strategies by offering a realistic environment in which students actively participate and experiment with a variety of specific classroom management strategies during a circle time activity (Mouw & Fokkens-Bruinsma, 2022). The VR application is built upon the work of Lugrin et al. (2016). In the Netherlands, kindergarten is part of compulsory education (pupils aged: 4-6 years). Therefore, all pre-service teachers are required to be able to teach in kindergarten.
The VR-kindergarten curriculum was previously implemented at a university. In the current study, it is implemented in three universities of applied sciences. The aim of our study is twofold: 1) We focus on describing what the perspectives of teacher-educators are regarding the implementation of a VR-kindergarten curriculum into the pre-existing teacher-education curriculum and 2) identifying which knowledge and skills are required by teacher-educators to (successfully) implement the VR-kindergarten curriculum. We did this by collecting data via questionnaires and individual, semi-structured interviews.
Method
Participants in this study were teacher-educators (n= 5) and tech-supporting staff (n= 4) from the three universities of applied sciences involved in the implementation of the VR-kindergarten curriculum “Keeping Order in a Virtual Reality Kindergarten Classroom” (Mouw & Fokkens-Bruinsma, 2022). Before the semi-structured interviews, all participants completed an online questionnaire containing background questions about their roles within the implementation of the VR-kindergarten curriculum. The questionnaire items tap into teachers’ Technological-Pedagogical-and-Content-Knowledge (TPACK; Mishra & Koehler, 2005). For purposes of the current study, wordings such as “mathematics” and “social sciences” were replaced by “Virtual Reality Module” from TPACK-items by Schmidt et al. (2009) and Sahin (2011) were adopted to adequately measure TPACK for VR applications and not digital technology in general. The adopted TPACK survey for Virtual Reality contains four technological knowledge domains, respectively labelled as technological knowledge of Virtual Reality (VR-TK) consisting of six items, technological pedagogical knowledge of Virtual Reality (VR-TPK) consisting of four items, and pedagogical content knowledge of Virtual Reality (VR-PCK) consisting of three items. The interview protocol delineated questions addressing two main themes, namely the expectations and implementation of the VR-kindergarten curriculum into the pre-service teacher-education curriculum and the (self-identified) teacher-educators' skills and knowledge to successfully implement VR applications. Within these themes, questions were asked related to expectations towards the VR-kindergarten curriculum and teacher-educator professionalization training, teacher-educators experiences with VR applications in general, the implementation of the VR-kindergarten curriculum, future intentions to continue the VR-kindergarten curriculum and reflections on improving the VR-kindergarten curriculum. The interviews were held from June to October 2023 and were conducted by the first and second authors. For the analyses of the interviews, a multi-grounded theory approach was applied, this approach allows the development of a codebook that is based on data-driven (open-coding) and theory-driven (in this study TPACK domains) codes (Goldkuhl & Cronholm, 2010). To determine the codebooks intercoder agreement, calculated with Cohen’s Kappa (k), five of the nine interviews were coded by both the first and second authors. The agreement was k .826, which is an acceptable value (Lombard et al., 2002).
Expected Outcomes
In line with the first aim, the results point towards the value of including teacher-educator perspectives when evaluating the implementation of a VR curriculum. Interviewees indicated that as users and implementors of the VR curriculum, have suggestions on how the VR-kindergarten curriculum can be further developed to meet not only their needs as teacher-educators into account but also the curriculum development and implementation at university of applied sciences. The participants also mentioned that they were unaware of the strictness regarding the VR-kindergarten curriculum implementation fidelity. Both the reflections for improving the VR-kindergarten curriculum, as implementation difficulties, were related to the setting of the curriculum and other prerequisites at the universities of applied sciences. Interviewees discussed difficulties in implementing the VR-kindergarten curriculum into the current curriculum. These difficulties were related to the teacher's workload and preparation, working with the technology, the number of students present in the lessons, and the number of lessons in a day. Regarding the second aim, identifying the required skills and knowledge to successfully implement a VR application in their curriculum, the interviewees were clear. Primarily, technological knowledge was deemed most necessary for successful implementation and for dealing with technological difficulties that arise with the implementation of VR applications. Knowledge about kindergarten education and pedagogical knowledge were also deemed prerequisites. Additionally, interviewees underlined the necessity of a positive attitude towards VR applications. Overall, specific skills and knowledge domains that were mentioned are related to the TPACK framework from Koehler and Mishra (2005). The study’s findings, together with best practices from the literature, will provide insights for the implementation of VR applications and curricula in pre-service teacher education. These insights are not only valuable for the further implementation of the VR-kindergarten curriculum at other pre-service teacher education but also VR applications in higher education in general.
References
Amhag, L., Hellström, L., & Stigmar, S. (2019). Teacher educators' use of digital tools and needs for digital competence in higher education. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 35(4), 203-220. https://doi.org/10.1080/21532974.2019.1646169 Goldkuhl, G., & Cronholm, S. (2010). Adding theoretical grounding to grounded theory: Toward Multi-Grounded Theory. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 9(2), 187-205. Kavanagh, S., Luxton-Reilly, A., Wuensche, B., & Plimmer, B. (2017). A systematic review of virtual reality in education. Themes in Science and Technology Education, 10(2), 85-119. Lombard, M., Snyder-Duch, J., & Bracken, C. C. (2002). Content analysis in mass communication: Assessment and reporting of intercoder reliability. Human Communication Research, 28(4), 587-604. Lugrin, J. L., Latoschik, M. E., Habel, M., Roth, D., Seufert, C., & Grafe, S. (2016). Breaking Bad Behaviors: a new tool for learning classroom management using virtual reality. Frontiers in ICT, 3, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3389/fict.2016.00026 Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. McGarr, O. (2020). The use of virtual simulations in teacher education to develop pre-service teachers’ behaviour and classroom management skills: implications for reflective practice. Journal of Education for Teaching, 46(2), 159-169. https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2020.1733398 Mouw, J. M., & Fokkens-Bruinsma, M. (2022). When technology meets educational sciences: Combining virtual reality and microteaching to train pre-service teachers’ kindergarten classroom management strategies. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (pp. 1043-1050). Universitat Politècnica de València. http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd22.2022.14618 Pomerantz, J. (2019). XR for teaching and learning: Year 2 of the EDUCAUSE/HP Campus of the Future Project. EDUCAUSE. Sahin, I. (2011). Development of survey of technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK). Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10(1), 97-105. Schmidt, D. A., Baran, E., Thompson, A. D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Shin, T. S. (2009). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) the development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 42(2), 123-149. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2009.10782544 Ungar, O. A., & Baruch, A. F. (2016). Perceptions of teacher educators regarding ICT implementation. Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Life Long Learning, 12, 279-296.
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