Could we speed up human development with VR and social learning theory?
Contributed by Harry Wright, Art Director at SHARE Creative
Do you remember when people used to squeeze your cheek as a child and ask what you wanted to be when you were all grown up? An astronaut. A fireman. A robotics engineer. A dinosaur. These are the typical responses that we get from kids when they’re confronted with the same question that still haunts some of us as adults when we sit around the dinner table at Christmas with the extended family.
But what if we didn’t have to wait until we were older to learn the skills needed to succeed in those future careers? What if we could’ve gotten a few steps ahead and mastered some of the fundamentals before we’d even started secondary education? How different would our lives be now? How much more successful could we have been?
Now, if the dinosaur response resonated with you the most, there’s a fair chance that the rest of this article can’t give you the answers you need. That’s just something you’ll have to work out on your own. However, with more conventional vocations and everyday tasks, there’s an enormous amount of untapped potential embedded in the relationship between VR and early human development that could help turn childhood dreams into all-grown-up realities. Granted, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it a concept of science fiction if not for one glimmer of hope: social learning theory.
Imagine if you will, how daunting it must be for a junior surgeon to cut someone open for the first time; or for a trainee pilot to make that initial jump from classroom to cockpit and the controls of an entire aircraft. It’s just as well that these people have been in similar situations countless times before: through virtual reality. Entrepreneur explains that VR allows people to perform tactile and intricate procedures, in a safe environment, developing their skills before applying them in the real world. According to Tech Republic the hospitality, healthcare, space, automotive, skilled trades and military industries are already promoting VR as a vital tool for training.
But if it’s already being acknowledged as a successful way to teach critical skills, why limit these learning opportunities to adults?
We are at our most receptive to new information as children. Indeed, the World Health Organisation explains that between the ages of 0–8 our brains are developing faster than at any other point in our lives, giving a higher capacity for change and retention. Albert Bandura (1977) believed children learn by watching and imitating those around them. They watch models (people) and encode what they’ve seen before reenacting it later on. In a nutshell, social learning theory (SLT) revolves around the idea that children learn skills through visual cues they encounter on a daily basis. With virtual reality, you can choose what these cues are, exposing kids to situations and skills they usually wouldn’t experience.
There are four stages to SLT which need to be traversed before the cycle is complete: attention, retention, motor reproduction and motivation. The first part, attention, is where the standard teaching process usually encounters difficulty predominantly because kids, as inquisitive as they are, get bored or distracted easily. For them to retain information we need to hold their attention. The beauty of virtual reality is that kids can be fully immersed in a controlled environment. Create a world of bright colours and exciting stimuli, hosted by entertaining characters (models), and you can hold their attention and educate them for hours.
Next up, retention dictates that the behaviour must be memorised before it can be replicated. This sounds simple enough but, when you think about the number of stimuli that kids are subjected to daily, it can be difficult to make particular actions stand out. Again, contextual additions such as colour and character interaction could make experiences memorable but ultimately repetition of the behaviour is key.
The motor reproduction stage can only be completed if the action is presented in a way that seems feasible to the child in order to make replication, and therefore success, seem possible. Otherwise they simply won’t bother trying. Salkind (2004) exemplifies this when he explains that if you tell a child simply to swing a bat to hit a ball, they’ll miss it repeatedly and give up. However, if you break these global behaviors down into simple steps: keep your feet stationary, raise the bat, watch the ball, swing at the right angle, swing at the right time, the process becomes more manageable for the child who learns how to repeat the action through individual processes.
The final stage of SLT, motivation, is interesting because the reward system would need to be adapted gradually over time. Initially, children who undergo this process would be receptive simply to positive reinforcement from the host character or a more rudimentary reward such as their favourite treat. However, as children get older, payoffs need to increase, maintaining the will to perform the behaviour. Gamification and competition could be integrated into the system to ensure the rewards outweigh the costs.
Altogether, trying to teach children practical skills through immersive aesthetics, at a time when they’re most receptive to visual stimuli, makes a lot of sense. VR technology is currently advancing at an incredible rate meaning the opportunities to apply it to teaching are growing in a similar fashion. Whether it’s performing CPR, driving a train or safely repairing a blown circuit breaker, as long as the stages are simplified, entertaining and positively reinforced, the possibilities for child learning are all but boundless. However, it’s important to stress that choice of participation is imperative — I’m not suggesting we breed kids for specific vocations and purposes. That would be just a tad too Orwellian, wouldn’t it?
References:
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Salkind, N. (2004). An Introduction to Theories of Human Development. Sage Publications, London.
