An integrative model of virtual reality supported immersive learning within a biographical stream of experiences

Despite the growing use of virtual reality (VR) in education, theoretical accounts remain limited in explaining how a technologically mediated activity becomes part of a broader learning process. Existing frameworks provide valuable insights into cognitive and affective processes associated with VR use, but offer less systematic guidance on how prior experience, instructional preparation, task design, learner agency, educator facilitation, and subsequent reflection interact across an extended learning sequence. This paper presents the Integrative Model of Experience-Based Immersive Learning (I-MEIL), a conceptual framework that positions VR-supported activities within a biographical and pedagogically orchestrated stream of experiences. The model distinguishes between prior and preparatory experience, situated immersive experience, and reflective and transfer-oriented experience. It further differentiates technological immersion from subjective immersive experience and from immersive learning, thereby avoiding the assumption that VR use automatically produces presence, engagement, reflection, or learning. Technological features such as fidelity, interactivity, and multisensory representation are conceptualized as conditional possibilities for perception and action whose educational significance depends on represented content, instructional tasks, learner interpretation and agency, educator guidance, and the wider learning context. Across the three phases, cognitive, affective, and excitative response states are understood as dynamic and contingent processes that may contribute to cognitive, affective, attitudinal, behavioral, and psychomotor outcomes. By specifying how technological, individual, and pedagogical conditions are connected across time, the I-MEIL provides a design-oriented framework and a research agenda for examining preparation, situated engagement, reflection, and transfer in VR-supported learning.