A Comparison of Immersive VR and Non-immersive VR on Social Skill Acquisition for Students in Middle School with ASD

Virtual reality (VR) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for use in the classroom. VR technology has been available for years, but education stakeholders struggled with adoption due to the high costs and complexity. As VR technology has evolved, a broad spectrum of VR has been developed for use including non-immersive to fully-immersive VR. While previous research show potential in VR for student learning, a direct understanding of specific types of VR is lacking. This study seeks to understand the potential effects VR may offer, specifically characteristics associated with how a student experiences a VR intervention and the effects of using a VR device for learning. A group experimental design was used to compare a fully-immersive VR intervention and an identical non-immersive VR intervention for a group of middle school participants with autism spectrum disorder (N=22). Participants were randomly assigned a condition, half (N=11) of the participants were randomly assigned to a screen-based non-immersive intervention condition, and the other half (N=11) were randomly assigned to the immersive intervention condition. In both conditions, participants experienced five social skill scenarios a day, for five days, in the same linear order. Using the norm-referenced Clinical Assessment of Pragmatics, participants were assessed prior to and directly following intervention to measure learning. Results indicate that while the more immersive condition did not produce higher acquisition than the non-immersive condition, both device conditions did produce significant increases in learning. Additionally, participants reported an almost identical level of presence, meaning that regardless of device condition, students perceived them to be similar