The effect of educational augmented reality on perceived motivational atmosphere and high level thinking among students

Background and Objective:The advent of new technologies has led to major changes in the classroom that caused changes in educational structures, patterns of behavior within the education system, and even instructional content. The use of teaching aids reflects the fact that the age of the teacher as the only force with educational authority has ended. Traditional educational classes are no longer very effective because they depend on specific time and place and cannot provide a real and appropriate context for learning. New technologies provide rich resources that can provide an opportunity for learners to grow. Today, one of the effective factors in motivating students is to use information and communication technology in education. In addition, one of the important goals of teaching and learning is to help students learn how to think productively by combining high-level thinking (evaluating ideas) with creative thinking (creating new ideas). Using modern information and communication technologies, students and teachers are aided to learn and improve thinking skills. Augmented reality is one of the new educational technologies that has been recognized by educational researchers. The effectiveness of augmented reality can be extended to other types of technology, such as mobile devices. The use of smartphones has led augmented reality applications to overspread in almost every area of study. The purpose of this study thus was the effect of educational augmented reality on perceived motivational atmosphere and high level thinking in students. Methods: The methodology of research was Quasi-experimental, with pretest-posttest and control. The population of the study was all second grade high school students in twelve Tehran city. 60 of them were selected by cluster sampling method and were replaced in two groups (30 person experimental groups and 30 person control groups). The research tools consisted of a perceived motivational atmosphere questionnaire and a high level of thinking by Saramd et al (2011). The experimental group was trained in six sessions of one-hour with educational augmented reality. Data analysis was performed using SPSS24 software and to test the research hypotheses used from multivariate covariance analysis. Findings: The findings of the study showed that the effect of educational augmented reality on perceived motivational atmosphere and high level thinking in the experimental group was significantly higher than of the control group. Al