Context / probleemstelling of aanleiding

Context/probleemstelling of aanleiding:

In the field of education, the implications and importance of research associated with memory and attention continues to provide insights into the design of educational tools, programs, and curricula for students. Effective instructional design needs to consider the amount of Cognitive Load (Sweller,1988) present for a student caused by: attention to tasks, retention of information, and transfer of information to alternate tasks. Therefore, educators have taken varied approaches in presenting materials to their students to maximize learning. Technological advancements are being increasingly incorporated into daily life and educational curricula. Many institutions are looking to take this a step further by utilizing more diverse tools to increase engagement with learning materials across various disciplines. In many industries and educational institutions, modern advancements such as Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR) have characterized new opportunities for (3-dimensional) learning, performance enhancement, and retention of skills.

Beschrijving van de interventie/innovatie:

We conducted a systematic review to summarize and analyze how 3-D technologies such as VR and AR affect cognitive load specifically in terms of learning, performance, and retention of information. In our systematic review, we went through a thorough and stringent selection process in which we limited our articles to those that investigated how 3-D technologies impact learning, memory, or cognitive load through validated psychophysiological techniques. We focused the search on papers that used Electroencephalography (EEG) or Eye-tracking as measures to understand how brain and behavioral correlates reflect memory retention, performance, cognitive load, and mental effort.

Ervaringen/analyse van de implementatie:

We split our questions into a series of sub-research questions to better describe and separate various facets of this review and grouped papers of this review into corresponding themes. We coded our data for each paper and extracted the means, standard deviations, p-values, and effect sizes of each of these research questions. We created forest plots through the programming software R to compare the difference of means to see whether there was an effect in a specific direction.

Lessons learned (implicaties voor de praktijk):

Due to the variability in experimental paradigms across studies, it is hard to draw conclusions on the relationship between 3-D learning and digital technologies and the corresponding amount of cognitive load and/or mental effort. However, we provide a comprehensive overview of psychophysiological measurement technologies for cognitive load and mental effort and conclude that future research will be instrumental in further advancing our understanding of how 3-D technologies can impact cognitive load and/or mental effort and how this can be further applied to the field of education.

Referenties (max. 2):

Sweller, J., Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning, Cognitive Science, 12, 257-285 (1988).