Fostering oral presentation skills by the timing of feedback: an exploratory study in virtual reality

Abstract Although scholars emphasised the essence of feedback delivered on virtual reality-based tasks, it remains unclear whether the acquisition of students’ oral presentation skills can be enhanced by the timing of feedback. An exploratory study, recently conducted in a Dutch university, explores the potential differential impact of immediate versus delayed feedback within a virtual reality-based task, in which students present to a virtual audience and receive feedback generated by the computer on presentation behaviour. By making use of an experimental study design, the potential effects of immediate feedback are compared with a control condition of a virtual reality-based presentation task with delayed feedback directly provided after the presentation. Performance assessments, including validated rubrics for oral presentation skills, were used for data collection. The results demonstrated no differences between the impact of immediate and delayed feedback on students’ presentation performance. However, significant differences in performance were traceable for students from differing study domains. As such, students following a technical study showed lower presentation scores in comparison to students from non-technical higher education curricula. More studies are needed to investigate comprehensive learning environments on students’ presentation skills in virtual reality, since combining different forms of feedback could foster students’ learning outcomes.