Chapter 6: Realism, Immersion, And Interactivityacy: The Effects of Virtual Reality on Students’ Scientific Writing

As students read and write about science, they organize new information about the world and how the world works. Observations and experiments yield questions, claims, and evidence that allow scientific knowledge to move from a rote, observational, and experimental action into a flexible dialogic based process (Kilinc, Demiral, & Kartal, 2017). Writing to develop scientific arguments and describe scientific phenomenon helps students construct understandings and apply scientific knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is to gain insight into cognitive processes related to students’ writing in science. In this chapter, we examine how interactions with virtual reality (VR) may inform students’ development of scientific literacy.