Effect of youth drug misuse prevention education program using the Metaverse platform

Objectives: This study aims to verify the effectiveness of a drug abuse prevention education program using a metaverse platform on adolescents’ learning motivation, learning immersion, learning interest, and drug abuse prevention knowledge. Methods: This study is a quasi-experimental study with a non-equivalent control group preand post-test design, and the subjects are second-year students from two specialized high schools located in J Province. The data collected in this study were analyzed using the independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test to determine the difference before and after the program application using the SPSS/PC 26.0 program. Results: The independent sample t-test results showed no significant difference in learning motivation and learning immersion, but learning interest and drug abuse prevention knowledge significantly increased. In addition, the experimental group’s paired sample t-test results showed that learning motivation, learning immersion, learning interest, and drug abuse prevention knowledge significantly increased. Conclusions: The drug abuse prevention education program utilizing the metaverse platform was found to be an effective program in increasing the learning interest of students in specialized high schools in a single region and in learning drug abuse prevention knowledge. This paper is meaningful as a study that conducted drug abuse prevention education using the metaverse and empirically analyzed its impact on learners.