Investigating social comparison behaviour in an immersive virtual reality classroom based on eye-movement data

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• The Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect describes how high-achieving peers negatively impact students' academic self-evaluations.
• Social comparison theory suggests students compare themselves to classmates, but the precise mechanisms in classrooms are unclear.
• Existing research lacks detailed insights into how students actively process social comparison information during learning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the extent to which students actively attend to and respond to social comparison information.
• To examine the role of peers' achievement-related behavior in shaping students' self-evaluations.
• To leverage immersive virtual reality (IVR) for controlled observation of classroom social dynamics.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an immersive virtual reality (IVR) classroom with 353 sixth-grade students.
• Experimentally manipulated virtual classmates' achievement-related behavior (e.g., hand-raising).
• Collected eye-tracking and gaze data to measure attention to social comparison information.

Main Results:

• Eye-tracking data confirmed students actively processed social comparison information from virtual peers.
• Increased attention to social comparison information (more frequent, longer gaze durations) correlated with less favorable self-evaluations.
• The study provides empirical evidence for the active processing of social comparison cues in a classroom setting.

Conclusions:

• Immersive virtual reality environments offer powerful tools for studying authentic classroom behaviors with experimental control.
• Students' attention to peers' academic performance directly influences their self-perceptions.
• Findings advance our understanding of social comparison processes in educational settings and highlight potential applications of IVR research.