Research on the mechanism of improving environmental information cognition and environmental awareness in site ecological virtual laboratory

In the context of today's global ecological and environmental crises and challenges, environmental education is a super important for achieving sustainable development. Traditional environmental education often suffers from superficial understanding of environmental information and a lack of depth in environmental awareness. The purpose of this study is to guide students towards a deep cognition of environmental information and to enhance environmental awareness, while exploring the pathways. The study establishes a Site-scale Ecological Virtual Laboratory (SEVL) on the campus. Based on the Game-Based Learning (GBL) model, the study introduces three mediators: self-efficacy, learning motivation, and cognitive load, to construct a Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM). The data for this study were collected from 146 Chinese students majoring in landscape architecture. According to the analysis results derived from PLS-SEM, we confirm that: (1) SEVL can effectively intervene in environmental education; (2) SEVL influences learning motivation which subsequently affects self-efficacy, ultimately leading to positive outcomes in environmental education (β = 0.040, p < 0.05, 95%CI[0.018,0.094]); (3) SEVL impacts cognitive load which then influences self-efficacy, resulting in effective outcomes in environmental education (β = 0.048, p < 0.05, 95%CI[0.012,0.088]). The study provides a reference for leveraging virtual laboratory in environmental education.