Exploring Differences in Student Learning and Behavior Between Real-life and Virtual Reality Chemistry Laboratories

Recent global events and educational trends have led schools to heavily rely on digital media to educate their students. Science classes, in particular, stand to lose substantial learning opportunities without the ability to provide physical laboratory experiences. Virtual reality (VR) technology has the potential to resolve this issue, but little is known if VR environments can produce similar results to real-life (RL) science learning environments. This 2 × 1, between-subjects study compares students’ learning results and safety behaviors in VR and RL chemistry laboratories. The study attempts to identify differences in learning experience (i.e., general chemistry content, experiment comprehension, laboratory safety knowledge) and laboratory safety behavior. Results indicate learning general content knowledge, laboratory skills, and procedure-related safety behaviors were comparable between RL and VR conditions, but clean-up behaviors were less frequent in VR. Also, the exploratory, risk-free nature of VR environments may have allowed the learners to elaborate and reflect more on general chemistry content and laboratory safety knowledge than in the RL environment.