Effectiveness of Augmented Reality Assisted Instructional Strategy on Learning Outcomes of Middle School Students in Biology Classrooms

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 encourages the integration of innovative technology to engage students and enhance their learning. The effectiveness of an augmented reality-assisted instructional strategy on learning outcomes in science for eighth-grade students was investigated. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design was used. A sample of 107 students from two government-sponsored Bengali-medium co-educational schools located in the Kolkata municipality was selected using the simple random sampling technique. 55 students participated in the experimental group and 52 students in the control group. Students of the experimental group learned the 'Living Organism' unit in science using the AR-assisted strategy, whereas the students of the control group learned the same unit using the conventional method. For collecting data, an achievement test with a reliability coefficient of 0.78, developed by the researcher, was employed. For data analysis, one-way analysis of covariance was performed using SPSS. The results of the study revealed that students taught the concepts of living organisms using an AR application (adjusted F-value = 7.44, significant at the 0.01 level) learned more compared to their counterparts. AR technology helped in a deeper understanding of the abstract concept of science at the middle school level.