Effects of Virtual Reality Laboratory on Students’ Creative Self-Beliefs and Achievement

This study aims to investigate the impact of a virtual reality (VR) laboratory on senior high school students’ creative self-beliefs and academic achievement. This quasi-experimental study employed a pretest, posttest, non-equivalent comparison group design. A total of seventy-two 11th-grade students (51 females and 21 males), aged 15–17 years, from a public high school in Jakarta, Indonesia, during the 2023–2024 academic year, were selected as the sample. Two intact classes were chosen as the sample using convenience sampling. The control group was taught using experimental videos, while the experimental group was instructed using a VR laboratory, both addressing the topic of chemical equilibrium. The creative self-beliefs scale and the academic achievement test were employed to collect the data. The pretest and posttest data were analyzed using ANCOVA and Quade’s ANCOVA tests. The findings demonstrated that, after controlling for initial differences, students in the experimental group achieved statistically significant gains in both creative self-beliefs and academic achievement compared with those in the control group. These findings suggest that creative self-beliefs and learning achievement can be enhanced by implementing VR laboratories as an innovative approach to support teaching and learning. Based on these findings, it is recommended that teachers use a VR laboratory to improve students’ learning outcomes in chemistry.