Measuring the effectiveness of VR skills training is crucial to understanding its usefulness in training the future of vital industries. In 2023, Transfr conducted an experiment at Southern Illinois University. Participants were SIU undergraduates with no prior experience performing the tasks they were trained on. The experiment assessed learners’ ability to transfer and retain knowledge from VR to the real world. Learners were also asked how appealing they found the VR training experience to be.
It s amazing seeing how effective VR training has been. Watching students at all levels of technical skill and knowledge transfer learning from the simulation to performance on the hands on task was assurance that what we were doing actually works, and works well.
Learners remembered more of what they learned in VR than from the instructional video. When given real tools and objects, learners correctly performed 76% of the steps in the VR-trained task versus only 68% for the video-trained task. This difference was statistically significant, t(23) = 2.45, p < .05, d = .50. We estimate based on this finding that 70% of students will learn better from VR than video.
Participants reported how much they enjoyed the simulation and the video and how enthusiastic they would be to learn other tasks using the same method. The results were clear: Participants overwhelmingly preferred sim-based learning. Participants enjoyed and were enthusiastic about sim learning immediately after playing the sim and continued to be after a real-world evaluation of their learning. Enjoyment and enthusiasm for video learning was markedly lower, especially after the real-world evaluation.
For enjoyment, a main effect of lesson type was statistically significant, F(1, 23) = 40.65, p < .001. For enthusiasm, there was also a significant main effect of lesson, F(1, 23) = 22.40, p < .001. In addition there was a significant interaction, F(1, 23) = 7.67, p = .011, reflecting that enthusiasm for video learning dropped after participants tried their hand at performing the task they’d learned by video.
I very much enjoyed doing the VR simulation. I was surprised at how easy it was to transition from doing the maintenance in VR to doing it in real life. I would like to use VR in the future to help learn new skills.”
