Abstract
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.