Researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) have found that virtual reality (VR) technology may help multilingual students better retain information.
According to the researchers, visual cues and body movements, like those in virtual reality settings, may help students better grasp tough concepts.
The researchers specifically zeroed in on how being multilingual can cause students to struggle with retaining new information and expressing themselves, especially in science classes due to their specific terms and complex sentence structures.
To help students overcome those challenges, a UGA researcher developed an immersive virtual reality game to communicate scientific concepts to students in new ways. Students were tested both before and after they played the game on either a desktop or through immersive VR. After the testing, researchers compared their scores to determine whether the game helped students better comprehend the material. The researchers found that all the students’ scores improved after playing the game, and multilingual students performed as well as their English-speaking peers.
The VR game relied on visual, audio, and body movements to give students multiple ways to learn and express their knowledge on a subject. Researchers referred to this as multimodal meaning-making. The researchers said that the study suggests that being able to construct meaning from multiple methods is critical for multilingual students. Researchers noted that the desktop game relied more on text to convey information and was designed to be less immersive.
“Virtual reality offers meaning-making processes or meaning-making opportunities that go beyond just verbal communications,” said Ai-Chu Elisha Ding, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education. “Multilingual learners performed pretty well because they got the support they needed, and they had different ways to express their understanding beyond the typical ways that they did in the science classroom.”
The study also pointed out that outside of the classroom people use more than just their words to communicate, with hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language significantly contributing to meaning-making. However, researchers found that these nonverbal cues are often overlooked in schools.
“In the U.S. education system, students mainly communicate their ideas through English,” said Ding. “Classroom interactions are also very verbal, meaning that students and teachers express themselves through written language or orally. That creates a lot of barriers for multilingual learners.”
For the study, the researchers worked with a middle school science teacher and an English as New Language teacher to develop a virtual reality game featuring content taught in the science classes. The game and the lessons are designed to help students learn science and develop their language skills at the same time. The study included 97 seventh-grade students in an urban middle school in Indiana.
“One of the key takeaways of the study is that teachers should pay close attention to using visuals and hand gestures to help students process information,” said Ding.
