Cross-Cultural Education: The Effects of AR Technology and Learning Styles on Learning Achievements of Sculpture Course

Objectives: In the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, more and more schools are opting for online learning, and the integration of AR or VR technology into learning is becoming a trend that is gaining popularity. For learners from different cultures around the world, cross-cultural AR technology may help them improve their learning effectiveness. With the development of technology, it has become common to integrate technology in teaching and learning. There is a growing debate about the way teachers teach in the school classroom, and there is a general desire for teachers to be the leaders of students, helping them to think and solve learning problems. Such a situation forces teachers to be constantly receptive to new knowledge, to improve themselves, and to better guide their students through flexible and varied teaching styles. Therefore, the use of appropriate technology in the classroom will improve the quality of teaching and the learning experience of students, and the development of augmented reality (AR) technology has brought a great change to the learning in the classroom. AR technology supports interaction between real and virtual environments, allowing users to manipulate the application interface of AR software. AR technology offers many benefits to the education sector, as it has the potential to engage students in more effective learning than traditional methods. It allows students to participate in real-life 3D environment simulations, increase their attention span, and engage in interactive learning through virtual manipulation. At the same time, in the learning process, students from different cultural backgrounds will follow their own preferred learning styles to conduct learning activities. Students perform tasks and learning activities in the learning process in accordance with their preferred learning styles. The study of learning styles has been of great value to the field of education, and therefore has received a lot of attention and input from educational researchers, gradually evolving into a separate field of study. The Sculpture Course is a required course for product design majors and is taught in a way that the instructor demonstrates to students the techniques of making relief clay sculptures. Since no previous research has applied AR technology to the teaching of relief sculpture, this study attempts to investigate the effect of AR teaching style on learning effectiveness when applied to Sculpture Course by using teaching style and learning style as independent variables, and then analyze the difference in learning effectiveness between students with different learning styles in traditional teaching and AR teaching style. Since no previous research has applied AR technology to the teaching of relief sculpture, this study attempts to apply the unique interactive function of AR technology to the relief sculpture course, allowing students to use AR technology to make relief clay models in the relief sculpture course. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate the effect of AR teaching style on learning effectiveness when applied to relief courses by using teaching style and learning style as independent variables, and then analyze the difference in learning effectiveness between students with different learning styles in traditional teaching and AR teaching style. Methods: In this study, 39 students from the product design department of a university in China, who were basically from different regions and had different cultural backgrounds, were selected for the experimental design. The students in the experimental group practiced relief sculpture in the AR teaching method, while the students in the control group studied in the traditional teaching method. They were given a pre-test of VAK (Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learning Styles) learning styles to distinguish which learning style type they were. In the pre-test portion, the subjects are first asked to fill out the VAK learning style scale to classify those with different learning styles. After the pre-test, students were informed of the grouping requirements and provided with the same instructional materials and resources (i.e., picture study sheets and AR tools) before proceeding to the experimental design, with the difference being that the control group used the picture study sheets to learn to make the relief clay sculptures, while the experimental group used the picture study sheets and AR tools to learn. The experiment was conducted in a professional sculpture classroom, and the control group and the experimental group were in two different classrooms for the experiment. At the end of the relief sculpture course, the teacher will score the students' works and the scores of the works will be analyzed as the learning effectiveness of the study. Results: The results of the experiment showed that the AR teaching method significantly improved students' learning outcomes compared to traditional teaching, and that the visual and kinesthetic students performed better than the auditory students in the different learning styles. Auditory students did not differ significantly between the traditional and AR teaching styles. Conclusions: The results of the study also showed that the AR teaching method has significant differences for different learning styles in cross-cultural contexts, and has a certain enhancement effect for students who are good at learning with their hands. The AR teaching method does have a substantial effect on the Sculpture Course, and will also provide beneficial help in product design education research in the future.