Virtual Reality in Preservice Teacher Education: Core Features, Advantages and Effects

Virtual reality in teacher education

Comments reviewer 1

Onze reactie

1. What are the unique features of the pre-service teacher population compared with other groups such as k12 teachers? Why VR education in pre-service teachers is important? Could the authors offer some discussions to address these questions? There are a few VR education review papers in the literature. How does the finding of this paper differ from other review papers? Perhaps the contribution is tied to the pre-service teacher population.

Thank you for this comment.

The following text was added to the manuscript (page 1) :

The focus of this study is on all kinds of pre-service teacher education. In pre-service teacher education (in contrast to for example K-12 teachers teaching in schools) student teachers learn to teach at the teacher training institute, and in internships in schools where they teach and learn under supervision of an experienced teacher. VR can have several benefits for student teachers and their teachers such as practicing professional competences in safe and diverse VR environments, the possibility of monitoring student teachers’ professional development by means of VR and the use of learning environments that otherwise would not be accessible.

It is correct that there are more review papers concerning VR in education. These review papers focus on the use of VR in specific domains (e.g., engineering education), include augmented reality or focus on the use of VR in education in general. To our knowledge, there are no review papers that focus on the use of VR in pre-service teacher education. The focus of our review study is specifically on teacher education.  

2. After applying two selection criteria (keyword and duplicate titles) exclude 6,003 papers out of 6,067 papers. Would the bars be set too high? What are the keywords used to set up the filter?

What if some of the papers do not have the matched keywords but may still cover the related topic in the main body? 

Thank you for the comment. This review aims to map Virtual Reality in teacher education, and to provide insight into the core features and effects of VR use in pre-service teacher education. Therefore, the keywords that were used to select papers, were the following: VR/Virtual Reality/Mixed Reality AND Teacher Education/Teacher Training/Teacher Professionalization/ Student Teachers, and similar Dutch terms (lerarenopleiding, leraren-in-opleiding, docenten-in-opleiding). These search terms were selected after a first exploration of the literature on VR in pre-service teacher education. This resulted in 6067 publications. We purposely selected the key words and did not set the bars too high, but focused on the specific application of Virtual Reality in the context of pre-service teacher education. There simply are not that many studies that focus on this topic.

We think that this is very improbable. Our strategy of title and abstract screening as a first selection is very common and it is very unlikely that core terms/keywords like teacher education and Virtual Reality are not mentioned in the title or abstract.

3. Fig. 1 needs to be recreated as some of the texts were overlapped and truncated. 

Figure one has been adapted in such a way that all text is visible now.

4. Three features of VR that are used in this paper are from Stavroulia and Lanitis. The authors shall add some discussions on why these three features shall be adopted in this study rather than other features. Especially, one research question is about what are the features of VR. The authors directly show the answer to these three features without extensive discussion, which in the reviewer's view, are needed.

We agree with reviewer 1 that this is an important aspect that deserves more elaboration and discussion.

To define VR (page 5 of the manuscript), we used and referred to several studies (Billingsley et al., 2019; Cooper et al. 2019; Sveinbjornsdottir et al., 2019) to define VR in the context of teacher education.

After the definition, we followed the characterization of Stavroulia and Lanitis to describe the three core features of VR in teacher education. To illustrate these three core features, examples and descriptions of VR in teacher education from several other studies were provided (page 6 -7 in the manuscript).  

We have added the following text on page five in the manuscript.

Not all included studies provide a clear definition of VR and seem to assume that readers know what is meant by VR in teacher education, or that a broad description of VR is sufficient. Fortunately, some studies explicitly define VR. Based on these studies, we defined VR in teacher education, following Billingsley et al. (2019) […]

On page 6 of the manuscript, the following text was added:

One of the included papers in this study, Stavroulia and Lanitis (2017) is one of the few studies that provides a clear description of what can be regarded as the three core features of Virtual Reality. Since their description matches with our definition and also matches with the broad description of VR in the other studies, we use the characterization of Stavroulia and Lanitis to describe the core features of Virtual Reality. We combine their description with examples from other studies, underlining their similar approach to Virtual Reality.

5. Refers to research question 1 regarding the advantages of VR in addressing these three features. Would VR also help improve learning (e.g., understanding the topics better compared with traditional methods)? The summary from Lines 327 to 335 shows that VR can not improve learning. Do the authors second this finding or does some literature work show opposing evidence?

Thank you for his comment. In line 325-341 we describe the results from studies that show that VR can improve the learning of pre-service student teachers. For instance, after a VR intervention, the student teachers scored higher on instructional self-efficacy (line 331), general teaching skills (line 332), the ability to observe and recognize dyslexic students (line 336-336), reflection skills and the awareness of emotions (339-340).

Virtual reality in teacher education

Comments Reviewer 2

Response Authors

The paper presents a literature review (2000-2020) on the use of virtual reality in pre-service teacher education. It summarizes the results, showing that the use of VR in teacher education appears to have positive effects on motivation, self-efficacy, and other teaching skills.

Although other papers present similar types of peer reviews (i.e. Huang, Richter, Kleickmann & Richter, 2021), the objective of this article is relevant to teacher education research and aligns with the themes of the journal. The research questions are clearly identified, and the method used for the review is well-described.

Thank you.

A potential weakness could be the broad period chosen for the review. Over such an extended period, technologies have developed significantly, leading to the comparison of very different experiences. Additionally, the authors should justify why they stopped at 2020. Updating the review to 2023 would have provided a distinct advantage over other similar reviews already published.

We elaborated on the chosen period for the review of the literature.

The following text was added (page 3 of the manuscript):

Since the aim of this review was  to map the new area of the use of VR in teacher education, we chose for a broad period for the review of the literature. By doing so, we also could include the first studies into VR in teacher education, and provide an overview from the start of this new development till 2020. As such, this study provides a good starting point for future (review) studies on VR in teacher p.

The results are clearly described, and the table summarizing the content of each article, its characteristic elements, and the main results obtained is commendable.

Tables and data are appropriate, easy to interpret, and understandable.

Thank you.

It is suggested to briefly present Desimone's (2009) theory (line 278), which is referenced through the image (fig.4) but is not described in the text.

Thank you for the suggestion. We added a short explanation of Desimone’s (2009) theory of action. The following text was added (page 18 of the manuscript):

Desimone’s theory of action regarding the effects of teacher professional development interventions (in our case VR interventions) includes four components (Figure 4). First, teachers participate in a VR intervention meant to improve their professional competencies. This ideally results in improved teacher knowledge, and/or teacher skills and/or teacher attitudes (block 2). Hopefully the teachers apply what they have learnt in the classroom (block 3), and that way improve their teaching quality, which may lead to improved student learning (the last block).