The Effect of a Virtual Reality Experiment Program on the Science Achievement, Science Related Attitude and Scientific Creativity: Centering the Chemistry Unit in the 10th Grade Science Textbook

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of a Virtual Reality Experiment Program(VREP) for high school students. For this study, the VREP was developed by using the 3D-Works and Virtual Reality Modeling Language(VRML). The experiments consisted of eight chemistry experiment items from the 10th grade science textbook. We selected 126 10th grade high school students. They were divided into two groups. Experimental group's students had a VREP aided instruction and control group's students had a traditional explanatory teaching methods for three months. They were tested for science achievement, science related attitude and scientific creativity as a pretest, and then retested as a posttest. The result of this study is that the VREP aided instruction is more significant than the traditional explanatory teaching methods for the science achievement and science related attitude. But VREP was no significant improvement in the scientific creativity. And then we knew that we need to develop more improved science instructional VREP and VR tools which are simpler directions for use and process. Moreover, in the future it will be interesting to develop a VREP that makes improvement for the student's scientific creativity.