Dynamic Engineering Engagement and Pathways for Wide-reach, Authentic Virtual Experiences

This project advances knowledge at the intersection of rural STEM education, immersive learning, and human technology interaction by investigating how immersive, decision-based virtual environments influence middle school students’ conceptual understanding, systems thinking, and engagement in complex engineering contexts. The project introduces a novel framework integrating immersive virtual reality (IVR), place-based analogies, and evidence-based instructional design to examine the development of spatial reasoning, risk perception, and problem-solving skills. This advances immersive STEM education by positioning IVR as a research platform to investigate how middle school learners develop conceptual understanding and systems thinking within contextually grounded engineering environments. The project will broaden participation in STEM by increasing access to high-quality, immersive learning experiences in rural school districts through teacher professional development, classroom implementation, and open-access instructional materials, the project will strengthen instructional capacity and support evidence-based STEM education. The project has three objectives: 1) Engage rural middle school students in authentic, decision-driven engineering challenges through immersive, place-based virtual reality experiences that connect geohazard scenarios to familiar inland contexts, supporting conceptual understanding, systems thinking, and STEM career awareness. 2) Equip educators with research-aligned instructional resources, co-designed through a design-based implementation research (DBIR) university-school partnership, that build instructional confidence, content knowledge, and fidelity in integrating immersive technologies into rural middle school STEM classrooms. 3) Build durable teaching capacity and long-term sustainability through cohort-based professional development, iterative module refinement informed by evidence, and a shared open-access repository of materials scalable to rural communities beyond the grant period. These objectives will be achieved through three overarching research questions: RQ1) How do immersive, place-based virtual reality experiences influence rural middle school students' conceptual understanding, systems thinking, and STEM interest and career awareness in the context of complex engineering challenges? RQ2) Which design features of decision-driven IVR environments, including branching scenario structure, place-based analogies, and consequence visualization, most strongly mediate student learning gains and engagement in rural classroom contexts? RQ3) How does a DBIR-based university-rural school partnership model shape the co-design, instructional fidelity, and sustained classroom adoption of immersive STEM learning experiences across rural settings? The project will contribute to workforce development by preparing students with systems thinking, data-driven decision-making, and problem-solving skills essential for success in an artificial intelligence (AI) integrated economy. This project was funded by the STEM K-12 program, which supports fundamental, applied, and translational research on STEM learning in both formal K-12 education and informal learning environments. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.