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.

最近的全球事件和教育趋势导致学校严重依赖数字媒体来教育学生。尤其是科学课程，如果无法提供物理实验室体验，就会失去大量的学习机会。虚拟现实 (VR) 技术有可能解决这个问题，但很少有人知道 VR 环境是否可以产生与现实生活 (RL) 科学学习环境类似的结果。这项 2 × 1 科目间研究比较了学生在 VR 和 RL 化学实验室中的学习成果和安全行为。该研究试图找出学习经历（即一般化学内容、实验理解、实验室安全知识）和实验室安全行为的差异。结果表明，RL 和 VR 条件下学习一般内容知识、实验室技能和程序相关的安全行为具有可比性，但在 VR 中清理行为的频率较低。此外，与 RL 环境相比，VR 环境的探索性、无风险性质可能使学习者能够更多地阐述和反思一般化学内容和实验室安全知识。