Virtual Reality in Teacher Education From 2010 to 2020: A Review of Program Implementation, Intended Outcomes, and Effectiveness Measures

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that recreates realistic scenarios in a controllable virtual environment. VR has been widely adopted in professional training of situational, adaptive, and complex skills within various occupations, yet the field of teacher education has only just started to utilize this technology in the recent decade. In order to advance the application of VR in teacher education, the current review presents a synopsis of state-of-the-art literature from 2010 to 2020. We conducted a review regarding the details of program implementation (e.g., VR system and simulated situations), intended outcomes (e.g., factual/conceptual or procedural knowledge), and measures used to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher education programs that implemented various VR systems. Based on the review of 46 empirical studies, we found that 1) VR-based training programs mostly targeted pre-service teachers, and that they most frequently simulated instructional situations; 2) VR has been used most often for fostering procedural knowledge; 3) the majority of studies reported positive results regarding the intended outcomes and the effectiveness of VR has been measured mostly by teachers’ self-reports. We also identified areas of improvement and future directions for the application of VR in teacher education and teacher education research.