This article by Silva-Díaz et al. positions itself at a pivotal point in the agenda for teacher education: the question is no longer whether to use immersive technologies in STEM education, but what role they should play in the development of teacher competence.
The empirical design, grounded in the CUTE-STEM questionnaire and implemented with a large sample (N=544) and a smaller follow-up subsample (N=58), allows the authors to draw a fairly sharp map of the “starting floor”: a cohort of future teachers who show strong interest in technology and almost unanimously acknowledge the educational potential of VR, AR, robotics, and sensors, yet perceive themselves as less competent when it comes to operationalising that potential in concrete practices. The decision to combine quantitative data with content analysis adds interpretive depth to what would otherwise remain a collection of means and standard deviations.
The most compelling contribution of the paper lies in the articulation between complementary training and shifts in perceived ease of use. The TEC-STEM + ACRI intervention, built on immersive experiences with commercial headsets and on independent design of resources using CoSpaces, does not alter the already very high recognition of the potential of these technologies, but it does significantly shift perceptions of difficulty in AR and immersive VR, with moderate-to-large effect sizes.
This combination of experiential use and creation of one’s own resources operates, in practice, as a small laboratory of technological appropriation: participants cease to view VR solely as a spectacular device and begin to recognise it as an approachable, albeit still demanding, educational tool in terms of classroom management, cost, and logistics. The qualitative responses vividly illustrate this tension between pedagogical enthusiasm and awareness of material and institutional constraints.
The study’s main virtue is that it does not conflate positive attitudes with actual preparedness. By showing simultaneously high scores in “educational potential” and a very limited use of VR/AR for teaching purposes, the authors expose a training gap that the one-off seminar experience only begins to address.
The paper suggests, through data rather than slogans, that the key is not simply to “expose” future teachers to immersive technologies, but to support processes of didactic design, resource management, and critical analysis of conditions of use, integrated structurally into initial teacher education. This is precisely where the article’s least developed flank opens up: it points to the need for more ambitious training strategies, yet does not explore in detail curricular models or institutional mechanisms that would enable the transition from an optional seminar to a sustainable training policy. For that very reason, the text is valuable as a starting point: it offers a robust diagnosis, replicable instruments, and an honest account of current limitations—foundations on which any proposal for integrating immersive technologies into teacher education will need to build.
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How to Cite: Silva-Díaz, F., Carrillo-Rosúa, J. ., Fernández-Ferrer, G., Marfil-Carmona, R., & Narváez, R. (2024). Assessment of immersive technologies and STEM focus in initial teacher training. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 27(1), 139–162. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.27.1.37688
