The Effects of Interaction and Visual Fidelity on Learning Outcomes for a Virtual Pediatric Patient System

One of the most common clinical education methods for teaching patient interaction skills to nursing students is role-playing established scenarios with their classmates. Unfortunately, this is far from simulating real world experiences that they will soon face, and does not provide the immediate, impartial feedback necessary for interviewing skills development. We developed a system for Scaffolded Interviews Developed by Nurses In Education (SIDNIE) that supports baccalaureate nursing education by providing multiple guided interview practice sessions with virtual characters. During the development and evaluation of SIDNIE we realized the importance of determining the visual and interaction fidelity requirements necessary for proper learning. In this paper we report on two fidelity studies conducted with nursing students. The goal of the visual fidelity study was to determine if our virtual characters containing life-like animations would have an effect on learning or if we would get the same effect using a stationary image of our virtual environment. The second study focused on the interaction fidelity of our system and the goal was to determine if the interaction modality had an effect on the learning outcome. In particular we evaluated the effect of voice input as compared to a standard mouse-click input for question selection.