가상현실을 활용한 교육의 해외 연구동향 분석

Abstract

Objectives This study collected researches on the educational use of virtual reality published in international journals, investigated recent research trends using text mining technique, and sought to explore future research directions.
 Methods For this purpose, abstracts of 1986 documents included in the Web of Science database from 2013 to 2022 were extracted and performed topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Also the changing trends of each topic by year were analyzed.
 Results As a result of the study, first, it is confirmed that words related to the positive effects and application areas of virtual reality in education, such as ‘present’, ‘immers’, ‘activ’, ‘practic’, ‘univers’, ‘school’, ‘project’, ‘content’, ‘object’, ‘engag’, ‘social’, ‘scienc’, ‘languag’, and ‘motiv’, were included in the top rankings. Second, the main topics are ‘use of virtual reality in language and science learning in school and university’, ‘potential of virtual reality as a learning tool in response to social changes’, ‘development and design of virtual reality simulators for engineering and technical training’, ‘research on the learning effects and user experience of virtual reality in pre-medical education’, and ‘research on spatial and motor skills enhancement in 3D learning environments’. Lastly, recent research topics show great interest in pre-medical education and training in spatial and motor skills, while research on the use of virtual reality in language and science education and its potential as a learning tool show a decreasing trend.
 Conclusions Based on these results, there is a need for more in-depth research focused on learning outcomes, such as learners' psychological learning aspects and instructional design strategies, considering the quantitative increase in researches related to the educational use of virtual reality. Furthermore, it seems necessary to explore new insights into the use of virtual reality by referring to previous studies overseas, especially the rapidly increasing results in the fields of medicine and spatial and motor skills training.