A critical outlook at augmented reality and its adoption in education

Abstract

Despite a significant volume of empirical research suggesting that augmented reality has a positive impact on student learning outcomes, it has not been widely adopted within education. This review critically analyses the literature to determine why this is the case. Our review methodology was based on the PRISMA strategy. A total of 169 papers were identified for use in this study and this group of papers was evaluated using content analysis. Specifically we analysed the research goals, motivation and the extent of the application of co-design in the research papers. We found that the research in this area is primarily student-centred, and a minority of papers apply co-design as a technique. This is significant because it is well understood that student-centred outcomes have the least effect on technology adoption within education. Based on these findings we make a series of recommendations including a shift away from research focused solely on learning outcomes and towards research which also considers how augmented reality integrates into the teaching environment.