Cross-Scale Spatial Reasoning: A Learning-Centered Framework for Designing Immersive Learning Environments

Abstract

Understanding complex scientific and engineering systems often requires learners to connect structures, processes, and behaviors across different spatial scales and levels of organization. Although research on spatial cognition, scale, multiple representations, and systems thinking has examined aspects of this challenge, these perspectives do not always provide explicit guidance for designing learning activities that require learners to integrate information across levels. Immersive technologies offer opportunities to explore otherwise inaccessible structures, coordinate representations, and investigate system behavior, but their educational value depends on the reasoning they support. This paper proposes Cross-Scale Spatial Reasoning (CSSR) as an integrative framework for understanding how learners establish and use spatial and structural relationships across scales or organizational levels. We describe five interrelated processes: scale navigation, cross-scale relational mapping, representational coordination, dynamic and causal reasoning, and consequence-oriented reasoning. Building on these processes, we develop a learning-centered framework that connects reasoning objectives to immersive design mechanisms, instructional scaffolding, and assessment. Illustrative applications in biology, semiconductor design, manufacturing, and architecture show how the framework can inform domain-specific learning activities. We also propose testable research propositions and approaches for evaluating cross-scale understanding, instructional effectiveness, and transfer. Rather than treating immersion as an educational outcome in itself, CSSR provides a basis for designing and studying learning environments that help learners explain how complex systems work across levels.