An epistemic curiosity-evoking model for immersive virtual reality narrative reading: User experience and the interaction among epistemic curiosity, transportation, and attitudinal learning

What situational contexts constructed by learning content or environments may facilitate learners' epistemic curiosity is a noteworthy issue for contemporary education. Besides, the importance of narrative design in pedagogical immersive virtual reality (IVR) applications has been highlighted. This study hence proposed an epistemic curiosity-evoking approach to integrate into an IVR learning system for narrative reading. Through the quantitative data collection from 72 post-secondary students, their user experience and learning experience (i.e., epistemic curiosity, transportation, and attitudinal learning) when engaging in the IVR narrative reading activity were explored. This study also proposed the transportation-imagery immersive learning model (TIILM) to analyze the interaction among the variables of learning experience by a series of PLS-SEM analyses. The results showed that the development of the IVR learning system with the epistemic curiosity-evoking approaches can provide students with a favorable user experience. The positive effects of the instructional approaches exploited in the virtual environments on the students’ learning experiences were also found, particularly for the benefits of cognitive perceptions. The hedonic experiences were found to play a more important role in learning experiences than the pragmatic experiences did. The narrative transportation was verified as a mediator which interfered with the relationship between triggered epistemic curiosity (driver) and cognitive attitudinal learning (consequence). The examination of TIILM contributes to identifying a cognitive research path in the structural relationships among epistemic curiosity, transportation, and attitudinal learning, particularly for IVR-related learning research. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are also addressed.