Shared Situation Awareness in Student Group Work When Using Immersive Technology

Sammanfattning: Situation awareness (SA) describes how well a person perceives and understands their environment and the situation that they are in. When working in groups, shared SA describes how similarly the team members view and interpret the situation in a given environment. Immersive technology comprises technology that integrates virtual objects into the user’s reality of a physical world. It holds great potential for the application in educational contexts and collaborative settings like group projects. Immersive technology can increase engagement, make complex concepts more tangible, and increase media fluency. When immersive technology is introduced into a real-world setting, it creates a mixed reality with virtual and physical elements. In mixed reality collaborations, the complexity of elements in the environment can negatively affect the shared SA of the group members. The research problem of this thesis is that the intersection between shared SA and student group work that involves immersive technology is under-researched to this date. The research question is ”How is shared situation awareness in student group work formed when using immersive technology?”. A case study of a student group containing a participatory observation of several of their work sessions was carried out, and the obtained material was analyzed using sequential analysis. It was found that the students do not prioritize shared SA but work individually, dividing smaller subtasks among themselves and focusing on their own tasks first and foremost. Communication is used sparsely to stay updated about the other students’ work status, which helps to build shared SA. Communication also plays a crucial role in building shared SA when using immersive technology. It was also observed that the students prefer to use immersive technology in a way that allows more than one person to see the same virtual environment, as it is the case when two virtual reality (VR) headsets are connected to the same application.