Abstract:

In primary education, a relatively large amount of time is spent developing arithmetic and mathematical skills. But before students are taught arithmetic strategies and associated algorithms, it is important that, as a base, they first fully grasp and understand the underlying concepts of the required arithmetic operations and mathematical insights. Visual support and aids such as images and mathematical models play an important role in the necessary comprehension and meaning-making. Despite teachers being aware of the added value that physical materials and applications of images as a reflection of reality can provide regarding students' foundational learning, they often seem to proceed too quickly to the more abstract, formal arithmetic and mathematical operations, which has a demonstrably negative effect on students' comprehension learning, preventing them from exploring and understanding underlying concepts, or failing to do so adequately to a sufficient extent. This occurs specifically in the arithmetic and mathematics domain of ‘measurement & geometry’, where teachers often find difficulty to select and develop context-rich materials, or to deploy appropriate visualizations needed for learning. It is precisely for such application that virtual reality (VR) and its immersive manifestation could serve as an added value for meaningful learning. Therefore, this experimental study, conducted among 159 primary school students originating from grades 5 and 6 age 10 to 13 from the Netherlands, investigated to what extent the use of VR as a visual learning support for illustrating underlying arithmetic and mathematical concepts has a characteristic influence on the development of arithmetic and mathematical skill. To collect qualitative data via pretest-posttest questionnaire survey to determine the level of comprehension in the domain of ‘measurement & geometry’, participating primary school students were randomly divided into two intervention groups and a control group. Intervention group one used immersive VR with a head-mounted-display (HMD). Intervention group two used non-immersive VR (without HMD). The control group followed the regular textbook teaching method without using any additional materials. An ANCOVA-analysis of the data showed that the application of both types of VR had a significant effect on the level of comprehension within the domain of ‘measurement & geometry’ in a direct comparison with the control group. Both types of VR indicated positive effects on the concepts “length/height estimation”, “locating, navigation”, “wind directions”, “position estimation”, “orientation in space”, “names of unfolded spatial figures”, “spatial understanding”, and “symmetry”. A comparison regarding the application of immersive VR and non-immersive VR showed that, despite significant differences in a comparison with the control group, no significant difference could be identified between the application of these two types of VR. This suggests that the type of immersivity is not a predictor of the observed effect. The main conclusion of our study is that regardless of the type of immersion, VR can help improve arithmetic and mathematics teaching, and in particular learning and understanding concepts in the domain of ‘measurement and geometry’ compared to traditional teaching methods. Based on our findings, it can be generally stated that teachers can apply VR to develop arithmetic and mathematical skills in students more effectively.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, immersive, non-immersive, measurement, geometry, arithmetic, mathematics, conceptual development.