Evaluation of the degree of intellectual maturity in the development of literacy through immersive virtual worlds: SAPIE methodology

摘要

The design of educational activities in immersive virtual environments is one of the emerging perspectives in the field of practice and research within e-learning. Giving the fact that, the interaction capacity in these immersive environments provides a social and educational dimension similar to the ones involved in face-to-face education. It could be determined that, it motivates, it stimulates, and it improves the e-learning educational model. The present article describes the development of reading and writing skills that can be achieved by using the didactic strategy SAPIE didactic which fuses the use of immersive virtual world (IVW) and the global model for the teaching of reading and writing. The IVW provides an accumulation of playful activities, focused on the adoption of characters and the role play. All these actions substantially promote the learning of literacy in children from 4 to 6 years of age. The present work is part of an experimental field research, involving 12 teachers, 58 children and 58 parents belonging to Centro de Desarrollo Infantil Gregorio Cordero of the city of Azogues in Ecuador. The children and the parents were divided into a control group and an experimental group. The diagnostic information inherent to this work was obtained with the application of a survey directed to teachers, which includes 10 questions; the application of the ABC Test of Lorenzo Filho to children and a survey with 8 items addressed to parents. Preliminary results show that 91.67% of teachers are unaware of teaching strategies to develop literacy, supported by the use of technology. Thus, based on that data the didactic strategy called SAPIE was designed. By analyzing the results through a pre and posttest to both groups while applying the statistical analysis t test for independent samples, a representative increase in the reading and writing skills acquired by the children in a short time was evidenced.