Impact of Mixed Reality Presentation on STEM Engagement and Comprehension: A Pilot Study on Adult Scientists

Abstract

Current educational presentation software used in STEM education fail to maximize student engagement and comprehension. Mixed reality presentation is one specific type of digital presentation software that has shown to significantly improve student engagement and comprehension. In this paper, we describe a pilot study on adult scientists which evaluates the usage of an integrated mixed reality presentation software in the Zyndo platform as an enhanced alternative to Adobe PDFs. A group of adult scientists ( N = 20), with higher education of at least a bachelor’s degree, from an academic research center at Harvard Medical School were randomized and asked to read two articles (one on Immunology and the other on Bioengineering) presented through either the mixed reality presentation or PDFs. Our results indicate that participants improved in nearly all metrics for engagement (ranging from + 4 to 51% improvement depending on engagement metric and subject matter) when viewing the mixed reality presentation over the traditional PDFs for both articles. Specifically, the participants demonstrated improved comprehension of the scientific content and time spent viewing the presentation in a content-dependent manner. Therefore, 3D mixed reality environments can potentially be applied to enhance student learning in STEM fields, particularly Biomedical Engineering in both on-line and in person classroom settings.

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