Factors influencing student teachers’ intention to use mobile augmented reality in primary science teaching

Thanks to the advancement of mobile technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) has become broadly accessible through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Mobile Augmented Reality can benefit science education in a variety of ways. However, except from some sporadic experimental cases, it is rather rarely employed by teachers and has not yet been fully introduced in education. Moreover, little research exists about the adoption behavior of mobile AR by pre-service teachers. Against this background, the current study proposes and validates an integrated adoption model to explain and predict the factors that significantly influence student teachers’ intentions to use mobile AR in teaching primary science. The study also introduces two new constructs, Perceived Immersion and Perceived Educational Value in the context of mobile AR. Eighty-nine undergraduate pre-service primary school teachers participated in a mobile augmented reality workshop creating mobile augmented reality experiences for teaching physics to primary school pupils. Following that, student teachers answered an online survey. The quantitative survey data was analysed using structural equation modelling. The study confirmed the proposed model explaining and predicting approximately 72% of the variance of student teachers’ Behavioral Intention to Use mobile AR to teach primary science. Perceived Immersion and Perceived Educational Value significantly influence Behavioral Intention to Use after being mediated by Perceived Usefulness. The study offers insight into the factors influencing pre-service primary teachers’ intentions to utilise mobile augmented reality (AR) in their future lessons, which is relevant given the growing interest in utilising these technologies in education. Implications are discussed.