Virtual reality, augmented reality and surgical training
Conclusion
The experiment hypothesis, that participants would have a stronger memory if they studied with AR, was supported by the data. The results revealed that learners who studied AR were able to obtain a higher percentage increase (3.5% higher). Moreover, the scores for students who studied with AR were more densely distributed in 50%, while a lot of the students who used images gained an increase of 37.5%. The findings in this experiment agree with the results of the studies carried out by Abass, Isyakka, Olaolu, Olusegun (2014), where the group using the three-dimensional visual objects were able to obtain the highest post-mean scores. These results build on the existing evidence that the three- dimensional objects ensure that the instructional content is more real and that 'stimulus materials could significantly enhance the performance of learners' (Abass et al., 2014, p. 68). The experiment also provides insight into the relationship between visualization and memory as AR allows participants to interact and look at the models from different perspectives, so when participants are completing the post-test, they can use their imagination to recall more information (Jobes, 2020). However, a t-test was carried out to identify whether the difference between the two means is statistically significant and to determine if the probability of the difference was down to chance or not. The result of the t-test was p >= 0.5, meaning there is a greater than 5% probability that the difference in the means is due to chance. Therefore, the null hypothesis is accepted, where there is no difference in test scores between AR and normal images. The major weakness of this experiment is that it is focused on knowledge absorption-based learning, rather than the practical skills required for a surgeon. It was unable to fully mimic a surgeon training process owing to the lack of resources (for example, many of the current AR and VR software is still under development, and the available ones are unaffordable). Moreover, the tests required lots of memorizing the terms of the different system. If I were to carry out the experiment again, I would ask the participants to identify the names through matching instead. Furthermore, I would include a control group, where students are not given any resources to study for comparison between AR and images, in order to provide a baseline against which improvements could be measured. Also, there are two methods to improve my experiment so that I can show that the means are statistically different. Firstly, I should increase the sample size, which would give a broader range of results and would also reduce the critical t-score value. Secondly, the sample selection was from students studying in academically selective schools. This means the students are generally well experienced at taking tests and learning new material in short amounts of time. The range of academic ability would typically be at the higher end and narrower as well. Thus, the benefit of AR could be masked by student ability. I could also investigate how students from private, selective and state schools perform differently as private school students would usually have access to better and more diverse facilities and technology. This also opens up further research into whether the learning effectiveness differs between AR and VR As technology evolves, there would be more programmes that can recreate surgical scenarios that can
be widely accessible for the general public, which allows for more research into how AR and VR can improve required surgical skills.
Discussion
The AR and VR training methods bring numerous advantages to the process of surgery training. Firstly, as seen from the results of the experiment, the use of AR improves knowledge absorption and hence strengthens
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