Itinerant Inclusion and Situated Technological Mediation: Democratization of Augmented Reality for Spatial Observation in Limited-Resource Classrooms

The digital divide continues to limit the incorporation of emerging technologies in public institutions with limited technological resources, especially in scientific areas that require high levels of visual and spatial abstraction. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effect of a didactic intervention based on augmented reality on spatial thinking associated with the comprehension of astronomical content in fifth-grade primary school students. The research was developed under a quantitative approach, with a quasi-experimental design of pre-test and post-test applied to a single group. The sample consisted of 28 students from a public elementary school in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. For data collection, the Analytical Rubric of Astronomical Spatial Thinking was used, validated by expert judgment and with interjudge reliability estimated by Kappa de Fleiss (k = 0.84). The intervention was organized into eight sessions using rotary stations, sharing of a mobile device, printed scoreboards, and complementary analog activities. The results showed an increase in the mean from 5.2 in the pretest to 8.9 in the posttest, with a statistically significant difference according to the Wilcoxon test (p