Enhancing Ocean Literacy with Virtual Reality

Educational science has a critical role to play in mitigating the current worrisome environmental situation. The ocean covers over 70% of the planet, and its health urgently needs to be restored.

To do so, individuals need to be ocean literate – meaning that they understand their influence on the ocean and the ocean’s influence on them.

While first-hand experience of nature is essential to develop connectedness and a positive attitude toward nature, the marine environment is often out of reach, making it challenging for citizens to feel concerned about the ocean.

Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) allow us to have virtual experience that would otherwise be too dangerous or impossible to have in the real world by creating visceral experiences that feel real while keeping the user safe.The aim of this proposal is to develop research in the currently under-studied educational field of ocean literacy by exploring the role that virtual reality can play in advancing the three dimensions of ocean literacy, namely students’ knowledge, communication skills and actions toward the ocean and its resources.To do so, I will combine quantitative and qualitative methods to study how each dimension of ocean literacy can be impacted by: (1) how the VR activity becomes embedded in a larger learning activity, (2) the emotional valence of the VR activity, and (3) the level of immersion, both physical and virtual.

I plan to run four studies spread over the four-year period.