VIRTUAL REALITY FOR TEACHING PRACTICAL SKILLS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used in higher education to provide repeatable, interactive and comparatively safe environments in which students can rehearse practical tasks. Yet the evidence is distributed across medicine, nursing, engineering, science, laboratory education and other professionally oriented disciplines, making it difficult to determine when VR contributes to genuine skill development rather than short-term engagement. This integrative review synthesizes secondary and empirical literature on the use of VR for teaching practical, procedural and psychomotor skills in higher education. Guided by the integrative-review framework of Whittemore and Knafl, the review draws on peer-reviewed literature identified through targeted searches of scholarly databases and publisher indexes, with emphasis on higher education learners, interactive VR interventions and outcomes related to observable skill performance. Across the literature, VR is generally associated with improved procedural knowledge, task accuracy, confidence and opportunities for deliberate practice. Recent meta-analyses report positive practical-skill effects in science, engineering and nursing, although newer evidence restricted to immersive head-mounted-display simulation found no statistically significant pooled advantage for nursing psychomotor performance. However, effects vary substantially by discipline, degree of immersion, instructional design, duration, pre-training, feedback and the comparison condition. The strongest evidence supports VR as a complement to, rather than an automatic replacement for, supervised physical practice. Important limitations include hardware and content costs, cybersickness, usability problems, unequal access, instructor preparation, weak reporting of intervention design, small samples and a substantially thinner evidence base for long-term retention and transfer than for immediate skill acquisition. The review proposes a pedagogically grounded implementation model in which VR is aligned with explicit skill objectives, preceded by orientation and pre-training, combined with feedback and debriefing, and followed by authentic performance assessment. Future research should prioritize longitudinal transfer, cost-effectiveness, accessibility and standardized reporting of VR interventions.