Paper—Fostering Students’ Cognitive Achievement Through Employing Virtual Reality Laboratory… Fostering Students’ Cognitive Achievement Through Employing Virtual Reality Laboratory (VRL) https://doi.org/10.3991/ijoe.v17i13.24529 Dian Ernawati () , Jaslin Ikhsan Yogyakarta State University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia dianerna15@gmail.com Abstract—Titration is one of chemistry concepts which highly requires la- boratory work in the learning process. However in the implementation, many ob- stacles are often encountered in a conventional laboratory such as lack of mate- rials, tools, and times which make it less optimal. Evidently these issues could be solved by employing Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Thus far VR makes great contributions especially to the education sector. One of them is through combin- ing it in the process of developing virtual laboratory. Virtual laboratory played an important role in the learning process specifically in terms of laboratory works. It was possible to manipulate 2D (virtual world) objects similar to 3D (real world) objects. This study developed Virtual Reality Laboratory (VRL) to analyze its characteristics, quality, and impact on students' cognitive achieve- ment. A research and development (R&D) method with a post-test design was applied in this study. The subjects of this study were 102 high school students in class XI. The samples were divided into 3 classes, namely CC (real laboratory); EC-1 (VRL); and EC-2 (real laboratory and VRL). The findings of students' cog- nitive achievement were analyzed using ANOVA and it was found that there were significant differences in students' cognitive achievement in those three classes. Students who used VRL had higher cognitive achievement than students who used the conventional one. VRL also received excellent grades from chem- istry educators. Thus, VRL is very useful as a supplement in the teaching and learning process. Keywords—titration, virtual reality, virtual reality laboratory, cognitive achievement 1 Introduction Acid-base titration is one of the chemistry concept considered to be difficult by stu- dents [1]–[4]. Acid-base titration demands the students to comprehend acid-base sub- ject matter, along with hydrolysis; and buffer. These three subject matters demand the students to be able to understand the properties of particles in matter, atomic structure, chemical formula and reactions, properties and composition of solutions, ionization and equilibrium [5]. Moreover, the students must also be able to calculate the concentration of a substance that was unknown, pH, volume of solutions, also have an excellent skill 44 http://www.i-joe.org