Background:

Providing students with virtual role-play experiences has the potential to bring counseling role-plays into large undergraduate courses.

Objective:

The purpose of this study was to trial a virtual reality role-play experience where students played the role of a student counsellor.

Method:

Seventy-three undergraduate psychology students played the role of a student counsellor interacting with a virtual client in two role-plays, one via desktop and one via head mounted display (HMD). Students provided feedback on their experience.

Results:

70% of the students found the experiences very interesting, engaging and immersive, with 82% preferring the HMD mode of presentation. The virtual characters were believable as distressed clients with 96% of students perceiving greater negative than positive emotion expressed by the characters. Most of the students (64%) mood improved from the beginning of the experience to the end, however 14% experienced a decline in mood. The students agreed (95%) that the experiences would be a valuable experience to a psychology course.

Conclusion:

Our results provide evidence that the virtual role-play experiences are well-liked by students.

Teaching Implications:

The approach presented in this paper represents a practical method to provide virtual role-play experiences to both on-campus and online undergraduate students.

中文翻译：

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帮助专业课程的虚拟现实角色扮演体验评估

背景：

为学生提供虚拟的角色扮演体验，有可能将辅导角色扮演带入大型本科课程。

目的：

这项研究的目的是试用一种虚拟现实的角色扮演体验，让学生扮演学生辅导员的角色。

方法：

73名本科生心理学学生扮演着与虚拟客户互动的学生辅导员的角色，有两种角色扮演，一种是通过台式机，另一种是通过头戴式显示器（HMD）。学生提供了有关他们的经历的反馈。

结果：

70％的学生发现体验非常有趣，引人入胜且身临其境，其中82％的人更喜欢HMD演示方式。虚拟角色被认为是困扰客户的对象，有96％的学生认为角色表现出的负面情绪大于正面情绪。大多数学生（64％）的情绪从体验开始到结束都得到改善，但是14％的人情绪下降。学生同意（95％）的经验将是心理学课程的宝贵经验。

结论：

我们的结果提供了证据，表明虚拟角色扮演体验深受学生的喜爱。

教学意义：

本文介绍的方法是一种向校园和在线本科生提供虚拟角色扮演体验的实用方法。