Mobile Mixed Reality for Critical Thinking in Healthcare Education

This dataset is linked to a submission to Elsevier titled: "Exploring mobile mixed reality for critical thinking in nursing and healthcare education: a systematic review".
Background: Mixed reality has increasingly been utilised in nursing and healthcare higher education as the ubiquity of mobile devices improves to access virtual environments (i.e., mobile mixed reality). However, the pedagogical consideration of how mobile mixed reality facilitates critical thinking skills is yet to be explored.
Objective: This systematic review investigated the state of the art of how mobile mixed reality facilitates critical thinking skills in healthcare higher education.
Methods: The review followed the PRISMA protocol and was registered prospectively with PROSPERO. A search in seven databases (MEDLINE, PsychINFO, AMED, ERIC, Scopus, Cochrane, and Web of Science) was conducted with 3488 titles and abstracts screened according to pre-determined inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in 12 included studies. The quality of included studies was evaluated using the Mixed Methods Assessment Tool (MMAT).
Results: The breadth of healthcare disciplines was limited to dentistry, medicine, nursing, midwifery, and paramedicine who mainly utilised bespoke scenarios on head mounted displays. Most scenarios were emergency or critical response by nature, with limited time provided for pre-brief, debrief, or overall user time. Only two studies directly measured critical thinking, with others indirectly referring to development of ‘decision making’ by experience of diagnosis, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of healthcare scenarios in a mixed reality environment. Affordances and design principles for future development of mobile mixed reality for critical thinking in nursing and healthcare higher education are identified.
Conclusion: While some pedagogical affordances of mobile mixed reality can be identified in a narrow number of healthcare disciplines; there remains to be limited valid measure of critical thinking skills used to quantify effectiveness. Future studies would benefit to consider scenarios beyond emergency and critical responses, include longitudinal studies that reflect development of critical thinking over time, and exploration of co-designed scenarios with and by nursing and allied healthcare students.
Registration: PROSPERO (ID: CRD42021286931).