Virtual reality technology in such aspects as spatial cognition and design thinking training has unique advantages and spatial cognitive ability is an important index of the basic education of architecture. At present, the cases of application virtual reality technology in architectural education mainly focus on the description of teaching process and analysis of technical process, while the evaluation of teaching results still needs further verification. This paper expounds the basic definition, formation and evaluation factors of space cognitive ability, and extracts the space scale cognitive factors. It also takes virtual reality technology as part of the teaching method into teaching reform, and makes a quantitative analysis on the improvement of junior students’ spatial cognitive ability in the form of a questionnaire. The results show that, after the intervention of virtual reality in the teaching process, students’ cognitive ability of building spatial scale has increased by 11.2 percent to 68.7 percent, while the understanding of the windowing scale has showed limitations. In addition, students who have been taught by virtual reality pay more attention to space experience, indicating that the way of spatial thinking is influenced by teaching methods, and virtual reality makes the relationship between visual representation and spatial thinking more close.