A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS PRESENTED BY REAL AND VIRTUAL FIELD TRIPS

Field trips are an important part of geoscience education. However, large introductory geology classes do not often have the opportunity to go into the field. As a result, many instructors turn to virtual field trips, but little is known about the relative effectiveness of the virtual teaching environment. We report the results of a study comparing student work and student actions during a real, physical field trip to Tourmaline Surfing Park and an interactive, multi-stage Quicktime VR virtual version of the same trip. The VR trip features 5 interactive panoramas and linked still photos that can be explored freely by students by panning and zooming. Students in both field environments completed the same written guided inquiry-type field exercise. We analyzed these exercises and video of student actions and interactions in the field and with the VR. Time on task was monitored as well as individual mouse-click actions. The written exercises were scored using a rubric to quantify aspects of their answers. Analysis showed no overall significant difference (p>.05) between the answers given by students in the two field environments. Differences between the trips emerged for two trip stops from correlation analysis of item-specific scores on individual questions compared with the same students’ overall scores. In a stop to examine faulted sedimentary layers, VR students showed a low correlation (<0.4), indicating that even poor students did well on this stop. Students on the real trip showed a high correlation (>0.4), showing that only good students did well at this stop. The reverse was true for a stop involving observations of a fossil deposit, suggesting this item was easier for students in the field. Qualitative analysis of student actions and interactions indicates suggests that fault offsets were easier to notice in the VR because we added color coding of layers as an optional hint, allowing easier disembedding of relevant visual cues. Students in the field had an easier time with the fossil deposit because they had more freedom to investigate the deposit from multiple angles and scales. Our results suggest that real and simulated short field exercises with modest teaching goals provide largely equivalent learning environments, provided that the virtual environment is freely interactive and at least partially immersive.