Augmented reality (AR) enhances teaching and learning with virtual information added to real-world objects. This technology has been successfully integrated to enrich education at different levels of education and fields of education. Many studies have shown that AR provides multiple benefits to education, including learning gains (Garzón & Acevedo, 2019), motivation to learn (Georgiou & Kyza, 2018), and collaboration (Ibáñez & Delgado-Kloos, 2018). As stated in the studies by Arici, Yildirim, Caliklar, and Yilmaz (2019) and Garzón and Acevedo (2019), science is the most popular field in educational AR. This popularity obeys the fact that AR helps understand abstract concepts that would be difficult to understand with other pedagogical strategies (Arici et al., 2019).
Despite the multiple benefits of using AR to enrich science teaching, some teachers are skeptical about using this technology in their classes. As noted in the study by Sáez-López et al. (2020), some teachers argue that AR may cause overload and distract the students. Other studies show that some teachers refuse to use this technology because learning to use it would require too much effort (Ali et al., 2022). Therefore, as with other forms of technology, we can infer that bringing the multiple benefits of AR to science education, largely depends on the teachers’ willingness to use it. Hence, in order to design plans to motivate teachers to use AR in educational settings, it is important to understand the factors that affect their intentions to use this technology. However, although some studies focus on teachers’ perspectives on the use of AR in science education (Salar et al., 2020), existing literature lacks studies that identify their actual intentions to adopt and use it.
Consequently, the purpose of this study is to identify the factors that affect teachers’ intentions to use AR in science classes. Our study proposes a model that predicts teachers’ intentions and behaviors based on two psychological theories, namely, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1985) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) (Venkatesh et al., 2012).
The TPB considers three factors namely, Attitude (ATT), Subjective Norm (SN), and Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC). These factors are rational considerations. However, rational considerations are not sufficient to determine an individual's intentions, especially concerning the use of technology (Khatri et al., 2018). Similarly, the UTAUT2 includes seven constructs namely, Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI), Facilitating Conditions (FC), Hedonic Motivation (HM), Price Value (PV), and Habit (HT). Nonetheless, to obtain stronger explanatory power, most studies using the UTAUT2, use it in combination with an external theory (Tamilmani et al., 2017).
Accordingly, our study merges the TPB and UTAUT2 into a comprehensive conceptual model to predict the intentions of science teachers to use AR in their classes. Our study contributes to the theory by focusing on the psychological aspects required for explaining science teachers’ intentions to use AR. Understanding these aspects allows taking actions aiming to encourage teachers to use AR in educational settings. The rational considerations of the TPB help weigh costs and benefits. On its part, the UTAUT2 is based on primary theories focused on technology acceptance and usage. Therefore, we posit that the TPB and UTAUT2 are suitable for examining associations among constructs, which leads to explaining science teachers’ intentions to use AR. As far as we know, this is the first study that predicts teachers’ intention to use AR in science education. The study examines the explanatory power of the proposed model, compared to the TPB and UTAUT2. Further, the study examines the importance of the constructs of the TPB and UTAUT2 within our proposed model to determine behavioral intention. Finally, the study validates the suitability of our model in the context of science education and AR.