HistARium: An Experimental Study of Immersive Augmented Reality for History Learning in Higher Education
Description
History teaching continues to rely heavily on traditional methodologies based on lectures, textbook reading, and memorization, which frequently leads to low student motivation, limited interaction, and difficulties in understanding historical contexts in a meaningful way. This issue is relevant because the lack of active participation in history courses can negatively affect academic performance, critical thinking, and long-term knowledge retention. Although previous research has explored the use of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) technologies in education, most of these studies have focused mainly on usability, technology acceptance, or student perception, without objectively measuring improvements in academic performance through rigorous experimental designs with control (CG) and experimental (EG) groups. To address this limitation, the present study proposes the use of HistARium, an immersive educational application developed with AR technology for Meta Quest 3 headset. HistARium was designed to provide interactive and contextualized historical experiences through 3D visualization and immersive interaction. The research employed an experimental design with 60 university students divided into a CG and an EG. Both groups completed a pre-test before the intervention and a post-test afterwards in order to assess differences in academic performance. The EG interacted with HistARium, whereas the CG received traditional instruction. The results showed a significant improvement in the academic performance of the EG compared with the CG, which exhibited only minimal progress after the intervention. In addition, the instruments used reached adequate levels of reliability through statistical validation with Cronbach's alpha. These findings suggest that immersive technologies such as HistARium can increase student engagement, facilitate historical understanding, and improve learning outcomes, supporting the integration of immersive educational applications into future teaching methodologies