Exploring the Influence of an Immersive Virtual Reality Environment on Training Pre-service Teachers' Inquiry-based Instruction

Abstract

Virtual reality has the great potential to be used in education and specially in teacher training. This paper described an experiment to examine the influence of VR environment on pre-service teachers' training on inquiry-based instruction. The instructors guided pre-service teachers to follow the principle of inquiry-based instruction and conducted teaching activities in the virtual system. Through qualitative data analysis, the results reveled that the pre-service teachers' performances of using inquiry-based instruction could be effectively improved in the immersive VR environment. However, challenges also emerged during the training. Discussion and implications were addressed in this study.