VocabulARy replicated: comparing teenagers to young adults

TL;DR

This study replicates an AR language learning experiment with teenagers to compare their responses to young adults, revealing differences in perceived mental demand and completion time while maintaining similar learning outcomes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that replicating HCI studies with different age groups can reveal important differences, highlighting the need for diverse sampling in AR research.

Findings

Teenagers found learning less mentally demanding than young adults.

Teenagers completed the study faster than young adults.

Learning outcomes were consistent across age groups.

Abstract

A critical component of user studies is gaining access to a representative sample of the population researches intend to investigate. Nevertheless, the vast majority of human-computer interaction (HCI)studies, including augmented reality (AR) studies, rely on convenience sampling. The outcomes of these studies are often based on results obtained from university students aged between 19 and 26 years. In order to investigate how the results from one of our studies are affected by convenience sampling, we replicated the AR-supported language learning study called VocabulARy with 24 teenagers, aged between 14 and 19 years. The results verified most of the outcomes from the original study. In addition, it also revealed that teenagers found learning significantly less mentally demanding compared to young adults, and completed the study in a significantly shorter time. All this at no cost to learning outcomes.