The study, conducted by Verónica Marín, Begoña E. Sampedro, and Marina Morales-Diaz of the University of Córdoba, sits at the intersection of two powerful currents in contemporary education. The first is the rapid migration of emerging technologies into pedagogy. Virtual reality, defined in its earliest days as a human way to view, manipulate, and interact with computers and complex data, has evolved into augmented reality, which layers three-dimensional digital images onto real environments in real time, and finally into mixed reality, sometimes called hybrid or extended reality. In mixed reality, virtual objects are superimposed on a real environment so that users can interact with virtual images while remaining grounded in the physical world. This conjunction of both realities deepens immersion and fundamentally changes the user’s perception of the learning space.

The technical affordances are genuinely compelling. Students working with holograms can participate directly in the development of content rather than remaining passive elements within it. They can interact with avatars to practice strategies and skills without real-world consequences, even while making mistakes, free from the pressure that errors typically carry. The holographic environment provides a safe scenario for manipulation, supports ubiquitous learning, and increases motivation by making the student an actor in the learning process rather than a spectator. These advantages have been documented across medicine, marine science, astronomy, and architecture, where mixed reality applications are already relatively common. The question the Spanish researchers posed was whether teachers, the gatekeepers of classroom technology, see similar potential for inclusive education, the deliberate design of teaching to accommodate the full diversity of learners.

The answer, on the whole, was sobering. The researchers administered an online questionnaire of fifteen items, twelve of which used a five-point Likert scale ranging from complete disagreement to complete agreement, covering both demographic variables and attitudes toward mixed reality in inclusive settings. The instrument proved statistically robust: Cronbach’s alpha reached .977 and McDonald’s omega .957, while an exploratory factor analysis yielded a single factor explaining 81.138 percent of the variance, with a Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin value of .939 and a highly significant Bartlett’s sphericity test. A replication using robust unweighted least squares extraction confirmed the unifactorial structure, with a goodness-of-fit index of .997 and a comparative fit index of .996. In other words, whatever the teachers were responding to, they were responding to it consistently.

What that consistency revealed was widespread skepticism. The participating teachers expressed a clear opinion that mixed reality, as a tool, did not promote inclusive education in secondary schools. Large majorities completely disagreed with statements claiming they knew how to design mixed reality learning proposals for students with visual impairments, severe developmental disorders, or attention deficit disorder. The authors attribute this largely to a profound lack of knowledge about the technology, noting that teachers had received neither technical nor pedagogical training in its use for inclusive environments. This finding contrasts sharply with earlier work, such as a 2019 study in which secondary teachers did feel capable of creating augmented and virtual reality materials to improve their students’ education, and it echoes prior Spanish research identifying the design of proposals for students with difficulties or disabilities as the principal obstacle to digital inclusion.

Beneath the aggregate pessimism, however, the inferential statistics uncovered meaningful fault lines. Using Student’s t-tests for independent samples, the researchers found statistically significant gender differences on four items, all favoring female teachers, which supported the hypothesis that women secondary teachers are more inclined to believe mixed reality can be used in inclusive environments. Female respondents considered themselves better prepared to incorporate inclusive proposals into their methodological designs, particularly for students with motor or intellectual disabilities and those who are intellectually gifted. Age, by contrast, told no such story. Analysis of variance found no statistically significant differences across age groups, contradicting the expectation that younger teachers, those between twenty-five and thirty, would be more receptive. Digital nativity, it seems, does not automatically translate into confidence with immersive pedagogy.

Discipline, however, mattered considerably. Teachers of Experimental Sciences consistently outperformed their colleagues in Arts and Humanities on items measuring confidence in designing mixed reality proposals for students at risk of social exclusion, students with attention deficit disorder, students with learning disabilities, and students with severe developmental disorders. The effect sizes were modest but statistically significant, with F values ranging from 3.134 to 4.157 and p values between .003 and .019. A bivariate correlational study further showed notably high relationships among nearly all questionnaire items at the .01 significance level, with only one pair, items nine and twelve, weakly related. The authors conclude that whether mixed reality seems promising for learners with diverse disabilities or giftedness depends on the professor’s discipline, shaped by experiences and beliefs, as well as on gender, which colors their views.

These results land in a field where the stakes are high and the research base is thin. The authors note that studies explicitly linking mixed reality with inclusive education remain scarce, even though associations have been described between information and communication technologies generally, and their immersive predecessors, and inclusive practice. Earlier work has shown, for example, that students with visual impairments tend not to use virtual or mixed reality at all, a reminder that the technology’s visual intensity can itself become a barrier. Teacher training has been identified elsewhere as a variable affecting inclusion through technology use, and the present study reinforces that conclusion: the lack of preparation means teachers are either avoiding mixed reality or incorporating it without adequate grounding, while the scarcity of accessible and affordable resources compounds the problem in secondary institutions.

The study’s authors are careful about its limits. The sample of 247, recruited through non-probabilistic convenience sampling and dominated by women, with a mean age of 31.48 years and nearly half drawn from arts and humanities, cannot support generalization. Context, professional development, and age may all constrain the findings. Yet the validated instrument establishes pillars for broader investigations, and the practical implications are clear. If digital inclusive education is the goal, resources must be created that are accessible to all, both technically and economically, and teachers at every level must be trained for their real and active incorporation into classrooms. As the researchers put it in their conclusion, who learns is not a group but an individual, each in his or her own way, and teacher training in inclusive education is the cornerstone of the entire teaching and learning process.

What emerges from this research is a portrait of a technology racing ahead of the professionals expected to wield it. Mixed reality can immerse students completely in the learning process and address a range of vulnerable situations, potentially improving the conditions of individuals who are too often left behind by one-size-fits-all instruction. But immersion is worthless if the person designing the lesson does not know how to build it, adapt it, or believe in it. The Spanish teachers surveyed here did not reject holograms; they simply did not know what to do with them, and no amount of hardware will change that on its own. The study opens a new perspective and a challenge: train teachers in the didactic use of these tools, design inclusive materials under this architecture, and pursue more research linking emerging technologies with inclusive education. Until then, the holographic classroom will remain, for most students with special needs, a vision hovering just out of reach.

Subject of Research: Secondary teachers' perceptions of mixed reality technology for inclusive education

Article Title: Secondary education teacher’s views on mixed reality in inclusive environments

Article References: Marín, V., Sampedro, B. E., & Morales-Diaz, M. (2025). Secondary education teacher’s views on mixed reality in inclusive environments. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-024-00023-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-024-00023-8

Keywords: mixed reality, inclusive education, secondary education, teacher training, virtual reality, augmented reality, educational technology, teacher beliefs, disability, Spain, survey research, digital divide