Development of effective oral presentation skills is an essential component of entrepreneurship education, but class size and time constraints can limit opportunities to practice and receive quality feedback. Immersive virtual reality can provide time- and place-independent opportunities to hone presentation skills in diverse settings with…

Interacting with objects in virtual reality can be an exciting experience. Haptic feedback allows virtual environments to appear more immersive. Does this increased immersion bear the potential to enhance learning if used properly in educational VR environments? This dissertation pursued two goals. First, to investigate the relationship between…

The use of existing and emerging technologies in teaching modalities and learning spaces provides the opportunity to present subject-area content using devices, programs, and modalities in more authentic ways that promote higher order thinking and promote long-term concept retention. In the last decade, advances in artificial intelligence (AI)…

This paper examines an intervention using experiential learning and simulations in a virtual world that can promote social proximity, tolerance, and cooperation in diverse societies. The participants in the study were 125 Jewish and Arab students living in Israel. A mixed linear model for repeated measures analysis that included time of…

In this paper, I consider a social movement for animal rights as a site of learning about a particular form of ethics. I use a multiliteracies framework, which emphasizes critical consumption and creation across a range of media forms, to consider how learning unfolds using a different kind of medium: the affective body. Activists in this study…

To harness the complexity of their high-dimensional bodies during sensorimotor development, infants are guided by patterns of freezing and freeing of degrees of freedom. For instance, when learning to reach, infants free the degrees of freedom in their arm proximodistally, that is, from joints that are closer to the body to those that are more…

Learning with hands-on experiments can be supported by providing essential information virtually during lab work. Augmented reality (AR) appears especially suitable for presenting information during experimentation, as it can be used to integrate both physical and virtual lab work. Virtual information can be displayed in close spatial proximity to…

Student interactions with game-based learning environments produce a wide range of in-game problem-solving sequences. These sequences can be viewed as trajectories through a game's problem-solving space. In this paper, we present a general framework for analyzing students' problem-solving behavior in game-based learning environments by filtering…

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and the subsequent shutdown of all of the schools in the United States thrust teachers into distance learning environments with little or no preparation. This mixed methods exploratory study of teachers' perceptions of the role of professional learning in reducing transactional distance in a virtual environment…

In the current study, we investigated the ways in which the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge were affected by (a) the type of spatial relations predominately experienced during learning (routes determined by walkways vs. straight-line paths between locations); (b) environmental complexity; and (c) the availability of rotational…

Two cases of context-sensitive mobile computing curricula for children are shown to develop analytical understandings of how science-related sense-making talk can be supported through physical and digital environment interaction, which supports play and learning through movement. Our work investigates how proximity-based computing mediates…

Objectives: The cue-reactivity paradigm has been widely used to assess craving among cigarette smokers. Seeking to replicate and expand on previous virtual reality (VR) nicotine cue-reactivity research on nontreatment-seeking smokers, the current study compared subjective reports of craving for cigarettes when exposed to smoking (proximal and…

This study intends to investigate how multi-symbolic representations (text, digits, and colors) could effectively enhance the completion of co-located/distant collaborative work in a virtual reality context. Participants' perceptions and behaviors were also studied. A haptics-enhanced virtual reality task was developed to conduct…

Reinforcement learning (RL) models of decision-making cannot account for human decisions in the absence of prior reward or punishment. We propose a mechanism for choosing among available options based on goal-option association strengths, where association strengths between objects represent previously experienced object proximity. The proposed…

As faith communities are moving online and creating virtual churches, one widespread critique is the disembodied nature of online relationships. Citing fears of engagement with others who are misrepresenting themselves, many argue that virtual churches are not "real" and Internet-mediated communications (IMC) should not be incorporated into faith…