Abstract:

The growing technological development brings impacts on education, so it is necessary to investigate whether these impacts translate into gains in learning, on the other hand, it is important to listen to the opinion of students about their learning process to understand if technological mediation corresponds to the expected objectives. In Portugal, there has been an increasing interest in building and implementing immersive experiences. (Cleto et al., 2021), created immersive classrooms to teach didactic content during the pandemic years (Cleto, Carvalho, et al., 2021; Cleto, Ferreira, et al., 2021a, 2021b). Technology is used in the mediation of processes, whether in the sharing of content or in the mediation of student-teacher communication, however, immersive technology adds the context component, inserts the student within the environment for which he is being trained (Pletz & Zinn, 2020). The situational learning approach assumes that cognitive learning processes always occur in a context of application close to the real one and, is more effective when it establishes a situational reference to the professional world (Pletz & Zinn, 2020).

Immersive experiences involve people, awakening in them the sense of spatial presence, Mel Slater says that presence is composed of two components: Illusion of Place, encompasses the definition of presence of "being there", defined as the illusion of being in an immersive environment even knowing that it is not there, and, Illusion of Plausibility, refers to the ability of the system to mimic real-world events in such a credible way that users are deluded that are happening in reality. There are multiple approaches to evaluate the feeling of Presence, they are objective metrics, those that do not depend on the user's opinion, data is collected by devices that measure heart rate, skin conductance, subjective metrics, data is collected through questionnaires or interviews, before and/or after the immersive experience, complementary metrics. They use more than one metric, and can be objective or subjective. (Melo et al., 2016). This study is the result of an investigation with 71 students, who accessed the immersive, computer-mediated environment to learn concepts of Portuguese literature. Represented by avatars, the students performed challenges, watched videos, read texts, etc. At the end of the class, they answered the IPQp questionnaire (iGroup Presence Questionnaire – Portuguese Version). This questionnaire is composed of three factors: Spatial Presence, the feeling of being physically present in the virtual environment; Involvement, measures the attention devoted during immersion, and, Experienced Realism, measures the subjective experience of the realism of the immersive environment. This study sought the following answers: What is the qualitative classification of the sensation of Spatial Presence? What is the qualitative classification of the feeling of Involvement? What is the qualitative classification of Experienced Realism? Are there differences in qualitative classifications between genders? Are there differences in qualitative scores between students with and without prior experience? The results suggest significant improvements in the factors, Engagement and Experienced Realism. No differences were found in terms of gender, but there were few differences in previous experience.

Keywords:

Presence, Involvement, Immersive Web Environments, iGroup Presence Questionnaire, Portuguese Version.