## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
Based on an IVR pedestrian safety education program, this study employed a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of a debriefing strategy on promoting knowledge acquisition and behavior performance in the IVR environment. The statistical results support the overall effectiveness of IVR as an educational technology and reveal the moderating effects of debriefing as an essential teaching strategy for IVR-based instruction. In sum, there are four main findings of the present study, which are discussed below. First, the within-subjects effects confirm that the IVR learning environment can effectively improve children's pedestrian knowledge and performance. This finding is consistent with the previous literature [31; 32; 33] that supports the effectiveness of IVR in promoting experiential learning through a technology-mediated presence. The unique affordances of  
Figure 5: Comparison of the two groups’ post-intervention assessment scores. (**a**) mean group differences in interpretation and decision-making scores in the knowledge test, (**b**) mean group differences in the behavior assessment scores from the three pedestrian challenges in IVR. ** The difference is significant at \(p\) < 0.01, *** The difference is significant at \(p\) < 0.001. IVR such as immersion, interaction, and safety are known to create high-fidelity simulation that is authentic, hazard-proof, and cost-effective [9, 10, 11]. Second, the results support the essential role of debriefing for IVR-based instruction due to its moderating effect on learning outcomes. A possible reason is that the debriefing activity provided students with an opportunity to assume an active role in both cognitive and meta-cognitive processes, such as recalling, analyzing, and self-evaluating their own IVR experiences. This finding corroborates the existing literature on debriefing and experiential learning: a structured debriefing can assist learners to integrate declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge [34], improve critical thinking skills [35], and promote knowledge construction and transfer [36], thereby enabling learners to assimilate the concrete learning experiences into their cognitive structure [24]. Third, although debriefing had a positive effect on knowledge acquisition and behavior improvement in the IVR environment, the moderating effect was found to be significant on behavior improvement only. This result is consistent with the findings of [PERSON] et al. (2014), which revealed no obvious correlation between knowledge acquisition and behavior performance in IVR-based instruction, with behavior improvement identified as the main learning outcome [26]. A plausible explanation is that the IVR environment is often used for practice-oriented pedagogy where the behavior improvement is likely the result of trial-and-error and reinforcement rather than rational cognitive decisions. Unfortunately, the debriefing strategy in this study cannot effectively address this shortcoming of IVR-based instruction: the diagnostic analysis of pedestrian performance in the debriefing session might not reveal all the misconceptions of traffic rules, as some may be hidden behind correct behaviors. As [PERSON] (2016) argued, learners' behavioral performance and cognitive representations are not completely mapped during the learning process [25]. Lastly, we found that the magnitude of the debriefing effect on IVR learning outcomes varied with different types of knowledge content and performance tasks. This finding indicates the complexity of simulated learning, which is supported by the debriefing literature. For example, the systematic review of [PERSON] et al. (2020) showed that the structured debriefing strategies in general lead to improved clinical knowledge acquisition, yet the effect of debriefing differs between clinical reasoning and clinical judgement [37]. Similarly, [PERSON] et al.