A reflective cycle-based virtual reality approach to promoting students’ learning achievement, sense of presence, and higher-order thinking in professional training

In professional healthcare training programs; field experience after physical courses is essential for students to become professionals. However; the outbreak of the pandemic has restricted such field experience; and so students’ problem-solving awareness when facing clinical emergencies in a professional field after graduation has become a critical issue. In conventional teaching; video-based instruction with case-based learning sheets is usually adopted for healthcare training. In this teaching mode; students generally lack opportunities to experience the process of dealing with authentic cases; and hence might be unable to immediately judge and solve problems when entering the workplace. To enhance students’ critical thinking and problem-solving awareness; the present study proposed a reflective cycle-based virtual reality (RC-VR) approach to provide a realistic environment and enable repeated practice. To examine its effectiveness; this study adopted a quasi-experimental design and applied it in a healthcare training program for risk assessment of maternal labor. The results indicated that the proposed RC-VR approach effectively enhanced students’ learning achievement; sense of presence; critical thinking; and problem-solving awareness in comparison to the conventional teaching approach.