Study on the Effectiveness of VR-based Curriculum in Improving the Counseling Ability of Pre-service Training for Gifted Educators

This two-year research intends to use the virtual reality curriculum to enhance the counseling ability of pre-service training for gifted educators. Combining with the viewpoints of differentiated teaching and functional analysis, it tries to observe and interview with gifted teachers, and develop the indicator-style scale for gifted students’ emotional needs, in order to improve pre-service teachers' awareness and appropriate counseling strategy. First, the study tries to establish the virtual reality classroom for pre-service teacher's training, and test the user's feelings. The VR-based classroom consists of a six-seater resource rooms, 6 gifted students, 6 sets of 10-15 minutes VR-based counseling training. It also compares the difference between VR-based training and general teaching to provide the preventive counseling mechanism for gifted students. It tries to analyze “the Observation Scale for Classroom Behavior Performance and Affective Needs of Gifted Students ", and provide the training to pre-service gifted educators. The study also analyzes the teacher effectiveness and conducted in-service teachers for the control group. According to the results, the level of simulation and comfort of VR videos is acceptable or even very acceptable. VR videos have a better effect on improving pre-service teachers to counsel for gifted students than those who use general text responses (p<.05), which helps improve their ability to judge gifted students' affective counseling needs and use related strategies. In addition, there are still differences how to guide gifted students between the on-site teachers in the gifted class and the pre-service students. However, through VR-based training, their ability of perceiving the affective needs of gifted students and applying counseling strategies can be enhanced, and this training can strengthen training of gifted teacher. It is suggested that the development direction of the follow-up is the development of more refined VR videos, and quantification of the scale and appropriate cut-off standards of “the Observation Scale for Classroom Behavior Performance and Affective Needs of Gifted Students ".