Exploring the impact of augmented reality on medical students’ intrinsic motivation: a three-dimensional analysis

Augmented reality (AR) is an innovative technology that has numerous uses in medical education. One prospective application that could be highly advantageous is to improve medical student’s motivation. The main goal of this study was to examine how augmented reality-enabled learning resources affect the academic performance of students, particularly in medical education. 153 medical students from 3 public and 4 private medical schools in Pakistan contributed to this study. With the help of a learning application created to project the learning materials and content from one of the curriculum books, students were able to experience augmented reality. The participants filled out post-test questionnaires for both text-based and AR-based learning, which adapted a pre-validated intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI). We selected three dimensions: interest and enjoyment, effort, and pressure and tension from the survey for this study. The statistical t-test was used to arrive at the results. P = 0.000 for all statistical models. The combined mean difference in all dimensions between augmented reality learning and text-based learning is 3.2. Applications for augmented reality offer promising prospects to inspire and motivate students to learn more actively and effectively, which in turn would improve the outcomes instead of text-based learning.