This study investigated preservice teachers’ emotional experiences while interacting within a virtual scenario-based teacher-training system called Simulation for Teaching Enhancement of Authentic Classroom beHavior Emulator (SimTEACHER). We created three types of interactions (no interaction, unexpected interaction, and expected interaction) within SimTEACHER and examined the influences of the interaction design on preservice teachers’ emotional responses in three aspects: key performance indicators (attention, emotional engagement, and sentiment), emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative), and four basic emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and anger). Fourteen preservice teachers from a 4-year public university in southwestern South Korea participated in this study. The data of the participants’ emotional expressions were collected using the Emotient software, which has been widely used for automated facial expression recognition and analysis. A series of one-way repeated-measured Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that participants experienced higher positive and neutral emotions, higher emotional engagement, and a higher feeling of joy when they engaged in unexpected interactions than when they engaged in expected interactions or no interactions.

Introduction: This study aimed to identify any differences in social presence and cognitive load among three types of 360 virtual reality (VR)-based videos lectures. We hypothesized that social presence would be higher when interactions among peers are visible in a 360 VR video lectures while the cognitive load would be also increased.Methods: A total of 48 college students were randomly assigned to one of the three study groups to view an assigned 360 VR video lecture. The three groups were: (1) an instructor-only video viewing group, (2) a classroom lecture video viewing group, and (3) a classroom lecture and activity video viewing group. The video lectures were differently designed depending on the levels of peer visibility and the interactions between the instructor and peers. The participants watched one of the three types of assigned video lecture and subsequently completed two sets of questionnaires regarding social presence and cognitive load. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted with a planned contrast analysis for the type of video lectures.Results: We found that, contrary to the hypotheses, students in the group 1 (instructor-only video) showed higher social presence scores than students in the groups 2 and 3. However, no significant differences were found in the cognitive load scores.Discussion: The results show that 360 VR video lectures with an instructor-only are more effective at enhancing users’ social presence than 360 VR video lectures with both the instructor and class-peers. We suggest creating 360 VR video lectures with the presence of the course instructor to offer learners the sense of actually participating in a lecture.

Successful problem solving begins with constructing mental problem representations and the identification of problem characteristics to clarify the solution. The purpose of the current study is to examine the design principles of learning supports promoting mental problem representation in the math problem solving setting. We investigated the mental problem representations and problem solving performance influenced by the formats of the learning supports. Through the analysis of participants’ visual attention and solution notations, the current study found that problem solvers’ visual attention on symbolic learning support increases whereas their visual attention on iconic learning supports decreases during the problem representation stages. There is a significant difference in problem solvers’ visual attention on iconic learning supports between the successful and unsuccessful problem-solving groups. Unsuccessful problem solvers tended to disregard critical elements in the math word problem.