Virtual reality technology in such aspects as spatial cognition and design thinking training has unique advantages, and spatial cognition is an important index of the basic education of architecture. At present, the application cases of virtual reality technology in architectural design education mainly focus on the description of teaching process and decomposition of technical process, while the evaluation of teaching results still needs further practice and verification. This paper expounds the basic definition, form and evaluation factors of space cognitive. It also takes the virtual reality technology as part of an Architectural Essentials teaching reform course, to extract the space scale cognitive factors of spatial cognitive ability, in the form of a questionnaire for junior student of spatial cognition ability to improve conditions for quantitative analysis. The experimental results showed that after the intervention of virtual reality in the teaching process, students" cognitive ability of building spatial scale increased by 11.2 percent to 68.7 percent, while the understanding of the windowing scale showed limitations. In addition, students who have been taught by virtual reality pay more attention to the sense of 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.