Leveraging Agency in Virtual Reality to Enable Situated Learning

Eileen McGivney

REVIEW 3 major objections 3 minor 23 references

Leveraging Agency in Virtual Reality to Enable Situated Learning

T0 review · 3 major / 3 minor · reviewed 2026-08-16 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read Virtual reality's educational value depends on designing for learner agency, not just interactivity or immersion.

desk verdict A short, honest position paper that makes a useful point about agency over interactivity in VR learning, but overreaches when it equates scripted VR role-play with Lave and Wenger's legitimate peripheral participation. read the letter →

arxiv 2504.12593 v1 pith:3ARYIQ2U submitted 2025-04-17 cs.HC

Eileen McGivney This is my paper · ORCID

classification cs.HC

keywords virtualrealityeducationagencysituatedlearninglegitimateperipheralparticipationinteractivityoutcomesinstructionaldesign

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This position paper argues that virtual reality's most important contribution to education is not its ability to transport students or let them handle objects, but its capacity to give learners genuine agency: legitimate participation in authentic tasks that situates learning in real-world practice. It claims that the field's focus on presence and interactivity has led designers to equate agency with the freedom to move and manipulate objects, when in fact the two are only loosely connected. The paper warns that if VR is treated as a highly controlled, didactic medium, it will simply reproduce the passive schooling that situated learning theory criticizes. Instead, VR should be designed so learners take meaningful actions that move them from novice toward expert roles, which could bring field-trip-like learning into classrooms at scale.

What carries the argument

The conceptual machinery is the distinction between interactivity and agency, with agency understood as 'legitimate peripheral participation' from situated learning theory: taking part in authentic, meaningful tasks that progressively move a novice toward expert status. This redefinition redirects the design goal of VR learning environments from maximizing immersion and hand-level interaction to giving learners consequential roles and decisions within a practice. The empirical anchor is the observation that agency and interactivity are not tightly coupled in VR, so more interactive systems do not automatically produce the kind of agency that supports situated learning.

What would settle it

A controlled study comparing two VR field trips matched for content and interactivity — one giving learners a defined role with consequential decisions, the other allowing free exploration without a role — would falsify the central claim if the role-based version produced no greater self-efficacy, motivation, or transfer to real-world tasks than the free-exploration version.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

The central claim is that VR's potential to make transformative contributions to education rests on how well it is designed for agency, where agency means a learner's capacity to take meaningful actions that progressively move them into an expert role — the kind of legitimate participation that situated learning theory requires. The paper distinguishes this from interactivity, the ability to move through and manipulate a virtual environment, and cites evidence that interactivity does not reliably increase a sense of agency, nor does an increased sense of agency reliably improve content recall. The proposed remedy is to embed learning in authentic tasks and narratives: for example, a VR field trip that situates physics learning in automotive manufacturing, where students run crash simulations and also control a day in the life of an automotive engineer. The paper warns that responding to VR's cognitive load by making environments more restrictive would turn VR into a tool of traditional passive schooling and forfeit its transformative benefits, which include self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and a sense of awe.

Load-bearing premise

The load-bearing premise is that a designer-created virtual scenario can provide legitimate peripheral participation to a solitary learner, even though the original theory of legitimate peripheral participation involves membership in a real community of practice with social interaction.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

VR learning environments designed for agency should increase learners' self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation even when they show no better content recall than slideshows or video.
Authentic, role-based VR field trips can make situated learning opportunities available to classrooms that lack access to field trips and apprenticeships.
Designers should blend guided instruction with unguided discovery and use narratives that make the consequences of learners' actions visible, rather than simply adding more interactivity.
Evaluations of VR learning should measure motivational, identity, and transfer outcomes alongside content-knowledge gains.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

A practical extension: the strongest test of the paper's claim would be a comparison of two matched VR environments, one with a defined role and consequential choices and one with free exploration, measuring whether role-based agency produces greater self-efficacy and real-world transfer.
The paper's emphasis on legitimate participation suggests that collaborative VR, where learners interact with simulated or real expert characters, might satisfy the social dimension of situated learning more fully than the single-user scenarios described.
If the argument holds, VR learning environments should be designed as spaces for judgment and consequence rather than as high-tech lecture halls; that would be a detectable shift in how educational VR is built and assessed.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

Colleague,

Quick read on McGivney's arXiv:2504.12593. It's a 3-page workshop position paper, and it does one thing well: it pushes back against the default VR-education framing that immersion and interactivity are what matter, and argues that agency—the learner's capacity to make meaningful choices—is the design axis worth attending to. That distinction is worth keeping, and the author's own empirical work (cited as [16] and [18]) showing that interactivity and agency don't always move together gives it some teeth. She's also admirably honest that her own data didn't find agency improving content learning; she doesn't hide that.

Where it gets wobbly is the bridge to situated learning theory. She states that situated learning requires legitimate participation, then gives an example: giving learners 'control over a day in the life of an automotive engineer' in VR transfers them into 'legitimate participation in real-world tasks.' That's not what Lave and Wenger's legitimate peripheral participation means. In the theory, legitimacy is granted by a community of practice, and participation is peripheral but real engagement with that community's shared enterprise. A scripted VR scenario, with no other members, no practitioner-granted access, and no consequences for the simulated work, doesn't have the social structure the theory requires. I think the stress-test note is right: the central inference from agency to situated learning via LPP rests on that equivocation.

That doesn't sink the paper as a design proposal. A weaker claim would work: designing VR for agentic role-play in authentic task contexts might support motivated, transferable learning, and the community dimension could be simulated or scaffolded—but that needs to be argued, and citing LPP as the mechanism doesn't get there.

Also note: this is a position paper, not a study. No new data, no new derivation. That's fine for a workshop, but the transformative claim in Section 2.1 is a prediction, not an established result. The paper itself is honest about that.

Bottom line: it's a clear, useful position piece for the VR-learning community, with a real conceptual slip in how it uses LPP. Should a referee spend time on it? For a workshop, yes. For a full journal, I'd want the author to either defend virtual communities as conferring legitimacy or soften the claim to simulated participation. I'd engage with it. I'd cite the interactivity/agency distinction. I'd bring it to a reading group if we were discussing VR learning theory.

Referee Report

3 major / 3 minor

Summary. This position paper argues that virtual reality (VR) can enable situated learning by heightening learner agency, where agency is defined not as mere interactivity but as legitimate participation in authentic tasks. The author distinguishes this view from models like CAMIL that equate agency with interaction, draws on her prior empirical work on VR field trips, and proposes a design example involving a VR physics lesson set in automotive manufacturing. The paper concludes that VR's transformative educational potential hinges on designing for agency and legitimate participation rather than for immersion or content-retention efficiency alone.

Significance. If the proposed link between agency and situated learning were established, the paper would provide a useful design principle for VR learning environments and would challenge the dominant focus on presence and interactivity. The author deserves credit for honestly reporting counterevidence from her own studies, including that increased sense of agency did not improve content learning gains, and for attempting to reframe the value of VR around motivation and identity. However, the central theoretical argument is not yet supported, because it relies on a contested redefinition of legitimate peripheral participation and does not reconcile the reported null results with the strong claim about 'transformative contributions.'

major comments (3)

[Section 2.1] The argument rests on identifying designer-scripted VR scenarios with Lave and Wenger's legitimate peripheral participation (LPP, Ref. [13]), but this identification drops the community-of-practice condition that is central to the original theory. In LPP, 'legitimate' means access granted by a community, 'peripheral' means participation in the community's genuine productive activity, and 'participation' entails mutual engagement with other members. The automotive engineer scenario described in Section 2.1 has no other community members, no community-granted legitimacy, and no authentic shared enterprise; it is an individual, simulated task. The paper's paraphrase ('meaningful actions that progressively move you into an expert role') strips LPP of its social and relational content. Because the claim that agency enables 'legitimate participation' is the stated mechanism connecting agency to situated learning, this equivocation is load-bearing. The author should either stop invoking LPP and argue instead for 'authentic task participation' as a distinct construct, or provide a worked-out account of how a virtual community can confer legitimacy and enable peripheral participation in the full Lave-and-Wenger sense.
[Section 2.1 (and the cited Ref. [18])] The paper's central claim that VR's educational potential 'rests on how well it is designed for agency' is contradicted, or at least heavily qualified, by the author's own empirical result, stated in Section 2.1: 'My own research finds that increased sense agency does not lead to increased content learning gains [18].' The paper then pivots to self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, awe, and wonder as the valued outcomes. That pivot may be defensible, but it is not reconciled with the vocabulary of 'situated learning,' which is conventionally tied to learning outcomes and identity transformation. As written, the strong claim that transformative educational potential rests on agency is not established by the cited evidence, which shows only affective or motivational effects. The paper should either explicitly limit the claim to motivational and identity outcomes, or provide a theoretical account of why affective gains should be privileged in a situated-learning framework.
[Sections 2 and 2.1] The paper defines 'agency' inconsistently. It opens Section 2 with 'Agency is one's capacity for acting and exerting control,' then contrasts this with 'taking meaningful actions that progressively move you into an expert role,' and later invokes self-determination theory (Ref. [22], 'autonomy to set goals and make decisions'). These are three different constructs (control, expert-role progression, and autonomy). The paper needs to specify which sense of agency is supposed to produce situated learning, because the design principles that follow depend on that choice. If the intended sense is autonomy, then the automotive-engineering scenario, with its scripted 'day in the life,' may not actually provide that kind of agency.

minor comments (3)

[Abstract and Section 1] There are several typos: 'agenct' for 'agency', 'authenticlaly' for 'authentically', and 'Massachuetts' for 'Massachusetts' in the author affiliation. The sentence 'embedded in the context in which occurs' is missing 'it'.
[Section 2.1] The phrase 'a day in the life of an automotive engineers' has a subject-verb agreement error; it should be 'an automotive engineer'.
[References] Several references lack full venue information: Ref. [17] is a dissertation and is cited without page details, and Ref. [22] appears to be a journal article without its full bibliographic entry. The reference list formatting should be completed according to ACM style.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No significant circularity: the paper's argument is a conceptual position grounded in external theory and the author's prior empirical studies, none of which reduce the conclusion to its inputs.

full rationale

This is a position paper, not a derivation with equations. The load-bearing claim—that VR's transformative educational potential rests on designing for agency and that this requires legitimate participation in authentic tasks—is supported by Lave and Wenger's situated learning theory (external) and by the author's prior empirical studies [16]-[18] showing that interactivity does not automatically confer agency. These self-citations are used as evidence for a premise (interactivity is not the same as agency) rather than as the source of the conclusion; they are independently falsifiable empirical results, so under the review rules they count as real evidence and do not raise the circularity score. The conceptual gap flagged by a skeptic—whether a simulated 'day in the life of an automotive engineer' satisfies Lave and Wenger's community-of-practice requirement for legitimate peripheral participation—is a validity or correctness concern about the strength of the argument, not a case of the paper defining X in terms of Y, fitting a parameter and calling it a prediction, or importing a uniqueness theorem from the authors' prior work. No equation or definition in the paper reduces the central claim to its own inputs. Accordingly, no circular step is identified.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 3 assumptions · 0 invented entities

The paper's central claim rests on three domain assumptions from learning theory and one unvalidated modeling choice about what counts as legitimate participation in VR.

assumptions (3)

domain assumption Learning is deeply tied to physical and social contexts and requires active participation (situated learning theory).
The paper adopts Lave and Wenger's situated learning framework as a given in Section 1.
domain assumption Agency is a primary affordance of VR for learning.
The paper states this in Section 2 and cites prior models like CAMIL as support.
ad hoc to paper Legitimate peripheral participation requires meaningful actions that move learners toward expert roles, and this can be simulated in VR.
The paper equates designed VR role-play with authentic legitimate participation in Section 2.1; this is the key unvalidated assumption.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Leveraging Agency in Virtual Reality to Enable Situated Learning." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/3ARYIQ2U

@misc{pith2026250412593,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Leveraging Agency in Virtual Reality to Enable Situated Learning},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/3ARYIQ2U}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2504.12593}
}

read the original 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.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

23 extracted references · 17 canonical work pages

[16]

Eileen McGivney. 2025. Interactivity and identity impact learners’ sense of agency in virtual reality field trips. 56, 1 (2025), 410–434. doi:10.1111/bjet.13513 _eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/bjet.13513

work page doi:10.1111/bjet.13513 2025
[18]

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Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1st edition ed.). Cambridge University Press

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[22]

Richard M Ryan and Edward L Deci. 2000. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. (2000), 11

work page 2000
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Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave (Eds.). 1984. Everyday cognition: Its development in social context (Cambridge, MA, US, 1984). Harvard University Press

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Pith tools

Reviewed August 16, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.

[1] [16]

Eileen McGivney. 2025. Interactivity and identity impact learners’ sense of agency in virtual reality field trips. 56, 1 (2025), 410–434. doi:10.1111/bjet.13513 _eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/bjet.13513

work page doi:10.1111/bjet.13513 2025

[2] [18]

Eileen McGivney, Anna C. M. Queiroz, Mark Roman Miller, Sunny Liu, Brian Beams, Eugy Han, Erika S. Woolsey, Kai Frazier, Xander Petersen, Jeff Hancock, and Jeremy Bailenson. 2025. Complexity of Agency in VR Learning Environ- ments: Exploring Associations with Interactivity, Learning Outcomes, and Affect. In Immersive Learning Research Network (Cham, 2025)...

2025

[3] [13]

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1st edition ed.). Cambridge University Press

work page 1991

[4] [22]

Richard M Ryan and Edward L Deci. 2000. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. (2000), 11

work page 2000

[5] [1]

Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave (Eds.). 1984. Everyday cognition: Its development in social context (Cambridge, MA, US, 1984). Harvard University Press

work page 1984

[6] [2]

Yaden, Federica Biassoni, Giuseppe Riva, and Andrea Gaggioli

Alice Chirico, Pietro Cipresso, David B. Yaden, Federica Biassoni, Giuseppe Riva, and Andrea Gaggioli. 2017. Effectiveness of Immersive Videos in Inducing Awe: An Experimental Study. 7, 1 (2017), 1218. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-01242-0 Number: 1 Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-01242-0 2017

[7] [3]

Day and Robert L

Samuel B. Day and Robert L. Goldstone. 2012. The Import of Knowledge Export: Connecting Findings and Theories of Transfer of Learning. 47, 3 (2012), 153–176. doi:10.1080/00461520.2012.696438 Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2012.696438

work page arXiv 2012

[8] [4]

Chris Dede. 2009. Immersive Interfaces for Engagement and Learning. 323, 5910 (2009), 66–69. doi:10.1126/science.1167311

work page doi:10.1126/science.1167311 2009