An Empirical Study on the Impact of Problem Clues and Self-generated Teaching Strategies on the Immersive Learning Effectiveness

Immersive learning has become an important learning method in the digital age, and embedding scientific learning scaffolds in virtual environments can improve the learning effectiveness. As a common teaching scaffold in immersive learning, the action mechanism of problem clues and self-generated teaching strategies needs further empirical verification. Therefore, this paper employed a between-subjects experiment with 2 (problem clues: present/absent) × 3 (self-generated teaching strategies: written text/facing the real person oral presentation/facing the virtual human oral presentation) to analyze the learning performance, intrinsic motivation, cognitive load, and cognitive processing of 104 participants. The results showed that problem clues could stimulate students’ intrinsic motivation, reduce cognitive load, and promote long-term memory encoding and retrieval, significantly improved learning performance; facing the real person oral presentation strategy demonstrated significant effectiveness in enhancing intrinsic motivation and facilitating cognitive processing, leading to improvements in learning performance; the combination of problem clues with facing the real person and facing the virtual human oral presentation strategies significantly improved students’ intrinsic motivation and knowledge memory level. In addition, this paper revealed the action mechanism of problem clues and self-generated teaching strategies in immersive learning from the perspective of cognitive processing, providing empirical evidence and practical insights for the design of teaching scaffolds in immersive learning environment.