Exploring Intervention Strategies for Distracted Students in VR Classrooms

As one of the manifestations of virtual reality (VR) in education, virtual classroom allows students to enjoy a near-real classroom experience. VR class creates much better engagement and helps to stimulate interest and motivation in learning, making it an ideal solution to online teaching and learning activities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distraction is an unavoidable problem in immersive virtual classes, which has a great detrimental impact on learning. However, how to intervene in students’ distraction behaviors in immersive virtual environments has not been thoroughly investigated up to now. In this paper, inspired by teachers’ instructional techniques in real-life classes, we propose three intervention strategies, namely eye contact, verbal warning and text warning, and explore the intervening effects of these strategies on the inattention of students seated at the front or back of a virtual classroom via eye tracking. Our results show that all of the proposed intervention strategies have positive impacts on the attention of students. This research gives evidence that teachers’ instructional techniques in the real world can be transferred to the virtual class, which provides a new insight for the future design of educational VR.