Development, Use, and Educational Impact of Remote Laboratories in Natural Sciences: A Scoping Review

Remote and digital laboratories have become critical resources for sustaining experimental activities in natural sciences and engineering when direct access to physical facilities is constrained. This scoping review of 470 articles published between 2021 and 2026 examines the current state of research on remote laboratory development and educational implementation, identifying disciplinary patterns, pedagogical approaches, and reported learning outcomes. The analysis, based on systematic searches of Web of Science, Scopus, and Springer Nature, reveals a marked asymmetry: research concentrates overwhelmingly on university engineering, whilst chemistry, physics, and especially biology remain underrepresented, the corpus concentrates geographically in Europe, North America, and Asia, and production accelerated sharply during the pandemic before stabilizing or declining. A critical finding is that much of the literature (particularly in engineering) treats student learning as secondary validation of technical infrastructure rather than as a primary research question. The review identifies a consistent and significant gap in rigorous investigations of scientific skill development in remote laboratories for natural sciences, and limited evidence, within the analyzed search strategy, of explicit pedagogical or didactic frameworks for integrating these technologies into science teaching sequences. These findings point to a clear research priority: the field requires concrete didactic and pedagogical models for integrating remote laboratories into natural science education, with sustained attention to authentic scientific reasoning and experimental competencies, particularly at pre-university levels where the gap is most pronounced.