Virtual Reality is an emerging educational technology due to its potential immersive, interactive and imaginative characteristics supporting pupils in the learning process towards meaningful learning. Furthermore, the current teaching of history is generally too traditional, making the subject being perceived as pointless and boring by students. These aspects lead to poor academic performance. In this context, this study focuses on analysing the eventual benefits of Virtual Reality in the teaching of history at Primary Education and compares its results with those of traditional teaching resources in two dimensions, academic performance and the motivation of students. Thus, an intervention was performed with 98 fourth graders divided into two groups, control and experimental. For the collection of the data referring to motivation, an adaptation of the Instructional Material Survey instrument from Keller [(2010). Motivational design for learning and performance: The ARCS model approach. New York, NY: Springer] was used while, in relation to the evaluation of the academic performance, a specific test was designed taking as reference the tests of the coursebooks for the unit of work “The Roman Civilization” of the subject Social Sciences. The results show statistically significant differences in favour of those students who used Virtual Reality, both in motivation and in academic performance.

Nowadays, Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the emerging technologies with a greater impact in the Education field. Research has proved that AR-based activities improve the teaching and learning processes. Also, the use of this type of technology in classroom facilitates the understanding of contents from different areas as Arts, Mathematics or Science. In this work we propose an AR-based instruction in order to explore the benefits in a 6th-grade Primary course related to 3D-geometry shapes. This first experiment, designed from an exploratory approach, will shed light on new study variables to perform new implementations whose conclusions become more consistent. The results obtained allow us to envisage that AR-based proposals slightly improve the classical didactic methods.

La Realidad Virtual está adquiriendo una gran relevancia en el ámbito educativo. Es necesario potenciar la formación de los futuros maestros en el uso de estas tecnologías emergentes que permiten mejorar los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Se presentan los resultados de un estudio sobre la motivación de 94 estudiantes del Grado de Maestro en Educación Primaria de la Facultad de Educación de Albacete (UCLM) que han participado en una actividad en la que, a través del uso de la Realidad Virtual como herramienta didáctica, han trabajado contenidos curriculares de Historia que deben enseñar en su futura práctica docente. Para medir la motivación se utilizó la adaptación del instrumento Instructional Material Motivational Survey (IMMS) de Keller (2010), elaborado por Loorbach, Peters, Karreman y Steehouder (2015). Los resultados muestran que tanto hombres como mujeres presentan una elevada motivación total (M = 5.16), sin diferencias significativas entre ellos en ninguna dimensión del modelo ARCS.

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technology with an increasing number of studies assessing its benefits in educational settings. However, there is a shortage of empirical studies aimed at evaluating the acceptance of this technology in primary education. The authors propose an extended version of the Technological Acceptance Model to examine students’ intention to use immersive VR. To this end, 111 fourth-graders completed a history teaching unit using immersive VR. Structural equation modelling was employed to assess causal relationships between six variables: prior knowledge, perceived attention, perceived utility, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment and attitude towards the use of immersive VR. The results indicate that students’ prior knowledge was not significant in explaining their intention to use immersive VR. However, perceived attention had a significant effect on this variable mediated through perceived utility. These results have important implications regarding the design and use of VR tools for educational purposes.