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.