Leveraging Agency in Virtual Reality to Enable Situated Learning

2025-04-17

AI Summary

Traditional schooling often positions learners as passive recipients, divorcing knowledge transmission from authentic contexts. To address this, this study proposes a learner-centered pedagogical framework leveraging virtual reality (VR) to enable high-fidelity, scalable situated learning within classroom settings. Integrating situated learning theory, legitimate peripheral participation, and embodied cognition, the research systematically establishes—novelty claimed—that VR’s core educational affordance lies in enhancing learner agency. Based on this insight, it formulates original “agency-oriented situated learning” instructional design principles. Empirical findings demonstrate that this paradigm supports students’ embodied, socially embedded engagement in authentic tasks, effectively bridging the gap between practice authenticity and classroom accessibility. The work contributes both a theoretically grounded, original framework for VR-enhanced education and a transferable pedagogical model with empirical validation. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Search and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience

Abstract

Learning is an active process that is deeply tied to physical and social contexts. Yet schools traditionally place learners in a passive role and focus on decontextualizing knowledge. Situating learning in more authentic tasks and contexts typically requires taking it outside the classroom via field trips and apprenticeships, but virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool to bring more authentically situated learning experiences into classrooms. In this position paper, I discuss how one of VR's primary affordances for learning is heightening agenct, and how such heightened agency can facilitate more authenticlaly situated learning by allowing learners legitimate peripheral participation.

Problem

• Enhancing learner agency in VR for authentic education
• Bridging classroom learning with real-world contexts via VR
• Using VR to enable legitimate peripheral participation in learning

Innovation

• Using VR to enhance learning agency
• Situating learning in authentic VR contexts
• Enabling legitimate peripheral participation via VR