An empirical study on using virtual reality for enhancing the youth's intercultural sensitivity in Hong Kong.

According to the census data published by the government in 2016, 92% of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region population is ethnic Chinese, while the number of ethnic minorities increased significantly by around 70% over the past decade. Enhancing the youth's intercultural sensitivity is becoming critical. Although many of the schools start to provide intercultural sensitivity training as extra‐curriculum activities, students often find them unattractive while teachers question their effectiveness. In this paper, we present a virtual reality enabled approach for enhancing the youth's intercultural sensitivity. The objective is to design and develop an approach that can benefit from using virtual reality to deliver the instructional materials, making the learning more effective. A total number of three different virtual reality learning scenarios have been created, covering topics such as views of marriage and family, religious beliefs, and language barrier. The empirical study found significantly increase of intercultural sensitivity among the 67 qualified participants after joining the session. The calculated linear regression model also suggested that the participants' perceived motivation from the virtual reality learning content positively contributed to the intercultural sensitivity increase, while interestingly the perceived enjoyment during the virtual reality exposure may negatively affected the learning outcomes. Lay Description: What is currently known about this topic: Although enhancing youth's intercultural sensitivity is necessary, the available learning materials are very limited in Hong Kong.Previous studies suggest learners are better motivated and perceive more enjoyment during virtual reality enabled learning when being compared to traditional ways of learning, but this might not always result better learning outcomes.Virtual reality has been used in cultural education in settings such as museums and galleries, but not in the classroom setting due to the accessibility to virtual reality devices. What the paper adds to this: Virtual reality learning contents can be designed and produced for effectively enhancing youth's intercultural sensitivity.The relation among instructional material motivation to learners, learners' perceived enjoyment during learning and the learning outcomes, in this case, the enhancement of learners' intercultural sensitivity, can be analyzed using a linear regression model.The latest generation of virtual reality headsets can be used in classroom settings for delivery virtual reality enabled learning experience. Implications of the study findings: Significantly increase of intercultural sensitivity among the 67 qualified participants demonstrated the effectiveness of using virtual reality for enhancing youth's intercultural sensitivity in the classroom setting.The virtual reality learning contents can be designed to better motivate learners, resulting better learning outcomes.Distractions resulted from over enjoyment during the virtual reality enabled learning activities should be reduced to minimize the negative effects to learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]