: The number of undergraduate students who report having at least one disability has been on the rise since the 1970s. With the advent of Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs), understanding how these students experience ALCs is critical to creating a fair and equitable experience for all students. This report examines one subset of this population: students with some form of diagnosed Anxiety Disorder. Although over a quarter of U.S. undergraduates report a diagnosis of some kind of Anxiety Disorder, this study focused on those who sought disability accommodations in their ALC classes. Using structured interviews, this paper identifies 11 elements of the classroom and learning experience that affect such students in these spaces. The paper concludes with recommendations instructors can take to improve the learning experience for students with anxiety and anxiety disorders.
: The recent COVID -19 pandemic has forced many institutes of higher learning across the globe to consider alternative modes of providing quality learning for students. However, developing and implementing safe spaces for academic advisement in online platforms that allow college students to explore their environment in an open and curious manner is challenging. The view that unsafe spaces put college students at risk for departure if they experience disengagement and a lack of support led this paper to explore how college students make sense of safe and unsafe advisement spaces, and how this understanding affects the ways they achieve academic success. Utilizing the PALEO framework, this paper contributes to existing knowledge on academic advisement by theorizing and offering practical ways to create tools that extend the capacity to solve problems during a global pandemic. The implications for re-imagining and coping with this new normal is discussed.
What happens when campus units come together to create both a shared physical space, and a shared mission space? This case study highlights a unique cross-campus partnership between the UCLA Science Libraries and two academic support programs to create a STEM Collaborative Learning Center. This space serves to help decrease achievement gaps in STEM courses through peer-to-peer active learning and collaborative study. The results of the collaboration have helped to promote student success, increase the value and visibility of the library, inform space design decisions, and innovate new ways campus partners can work together to achieve shared goals.
The multiple case study (Flyvbjerg, 2011; Stake, 2006) of three new rural high school libraries, located in two states in the U.S. Midwest, and the school communities they serve are part of a long-term research agenda grounded in a critical perspective (Anderson, 1989) and devoted to deepening the understanding of the relationships between teenagers’ student peer culture, in the U.S. commonly perceived as intrinsically problematic, and the contributions of informal learning environments and non-classroom spaces (NCS) to school social climate (Voight & Nation, 2016). We found that school libraries are places prone to promote positive school climates.
The purpose of this assessment report is to analyze The Journal of Learning Spaces citation data in order to see the impact the journal’s content is making in learning communities. A similar report was conducted in 2017 and an update of data was desired to effectively see the impact since the journal’s 2011 foundation. The data analyzed in this report are collected from Google Scholar, ERIC database, and the viewing data from Journal of Learning Spaces’ files.
This study examined instructional shifts associated with teaching in environments optimized for active learning, including how faculty made decisions about teaching and their perceptions of how students responded to those changes. The interviews and subsequent analysis reveal a broad range of course changes, from small modifications of existing activities to large shifts towards collaborative learning, many of which emerged during the term rather than being planned in advance. The faculty discuss several factors that influenced their decisions, including prior experience, professional identity, student engagement, and perceived and realized affordances of the environments.
Universities are investing considerable funds in designing and building innovative learning spaces without knowing the positive impact on student learning and their achievement of employability skills for the 21 st century. There is a possibility of designing these new generation learning spaces to enable active and deep learning approaches to be employed to improve student learning outcomes and their achievement of employability skills. This paper proposes that an evaluative framework for innovative learning spaces and tools to measure the impact of these learning spaces on students’ achievement of employability skills is a worthy endeavour. Best practice innovative active learning strategies can then be identified and incorporated into a professional learning module for academics teaching in higher education. The outcomes can guide universities in developing learning spaces that maximise student learning consistent with 21 st century employability skills.
While the interior design of classroom spaces has evolved to support active learning methods, few studies have isolated environment changes from curriculum changes to understand the impact of space on behavior (Brooks, Walker, & Baepler, 2014). Adapting an observation instrument from the Brooks (2012) study, “Space and Consequences”, this research extends previous work in a unique circumstance that allowed the observation of a course which alternated class meetings between two differently designed spaces. We gathered perspectives from 296 students and 9 instructors along with classroom observations which highlighted eye contact as important to both instructors and students in promoting engagement.
Libraries in higher education face drastic spatial changes, transforming spaces traditionally used for housing books to spaces for interaction and shifting from individual learning to team-based learning. This study aims to (1) identify space uses, (2) examine the environmental satisfaction, support for productivity, and perceived productivity depending on space, and (3) test their relationships. The results of 66 survey responses suggest that students still come to the library for individual study, and students in quiet zones show high environmental satisfaction. Environmental satisfaction is indirectly associated with creativity, while environmental support with acoustic comfort is directly related to concentration.
Many academic libraries renovate physical spaces to address the needs of the 21st century learner. This study presents the assessment tools used to evaluate the use of space prior to a branch library renovation as well as results of two post-renovation assessments to examine the success of the project. The pre-renovation survey showed that library users desired extended hours of operation, better furniture, more power outlets, more private and group study spaces, better lighting, and more comfort. Both post-renovation survey results indicated an increase in satisfaction of all areas except access to food options and hours of operation.
The physical space of campus may influence student belonging. Quantitative data were collected using a bespoke questionnaire among a diverse group of students at a post-92 UK university. A total of 635 students, primarily female, undergraduate and of diverse ethnicity participated. Overall sense of belonging and agreement that campus space was important were high, with no differences by study or demographic characteristics. The main functions identified were academic or social, as were the spaces students considered most important. Gender and ethnicity differences in the extent to which the campus matched expectations were seen.
During the course of this research, the author attempted to locate institutions and background information about spaces that would be similar in scope to a digital scholarship lab (or scholars lab) being proposed in a university library. The information is meant to serve as a guide for the space design project, but it will be an important benchmarking tool for existing spaces. A framework is provided as a planning document for other libraries that are considering the development of such a space in an academic library.
This paper compares the longitudinal results of three LibQUAL+ studies conducted at the University of Idaho Library. In particular, the most recent survey follows a major renovation that prioritized study space and a collaborative learning environment. The impact upon patron satisfaction across categories was examined and the highest satisfaction was found among daily library users and faculty, although differences emerged when individual respondent groups were compared. Opportunities for better engagement with daily library users and graduate students were identified. Overall, it was found that the renovation had a positive impact on satisfaction scores.
The tension between cultivating inclusive library makerspaces and the gender biases rooted in the spatial configurations of makerspaces are examined in this article. This case study outlines a pilot study that investigated the relationship between gender identity and the decisions that study participants made regarding how and why they navigated a library makerspace in a certain way. Specifically, the guiding research question asked: “How does gender identity potentially impact the creation processes and behaviors of students in tech-centric environments such as makerspaces?” The study yielded three preliminary findings: men-identified users were more mobile in the makerspace than women-identified users; conventional makerspace technologies were readily coded as being either associated with men or women; participants pointed to gender identity as a factor informing their decisioning during their collaborative making experience.
Determining ways to help retain students in higher education institutions is becoming an issue with greater urgency with each passing year. This study looked at the possibility of learning environments as one way to influence student retention and student perception of engagement, using the theoretical lens of sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) by reviewing data from an institution of higher education in the Northeast of the United States. To that end, data on the number of students enrolled in one semester and correlation between learning environment and course attrition were compared ( n =3926). No significant relationship was found with a phi correlation coefficient (o = .021, p < .05) between these variables, but the sample was further investigated with a survey to determine perceptions of higher education students in either traditional or Learning Studio learning environments regarding course retention/attrition. Findings include participant support of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (1978), in that, participants affirmed the benefit of social interaction with instructors and peers. On the other hand, concerns about instructor competence with technology was noted as a negative aspect of the Learning Studio.
This study investigates the role of space, material, and affect in undergraduate and graduate students’ lived experiences within an open Future Learning Space (FLS) and speaks to the call for research on learning communities in learning spaces, as described in Hod, Bielaczyc, and Ben-Zvi (2018). The methodological approach consists of semi-structured phenomenological interviews with thirteen users of the FLS and thematic analysis to uncover themes. Findings suggest the FLS was able to: (1) bring together individuals by producing individual and shared affective responses; (2) hold community together and inform perceptions; and (3) move the community together and shape practices. This study indicates that open FLSs are complex systems constructed by users and can meet some of the criteria for a learning community (LC), especially if we broaden the definitions to take into account implicit versions of an LC.
This is a report of the third phase of a research study on students’ groupwork. The two earlier phases of the research focused on the assessment and outcome of students’ groupwork in general, but at this phase the focus is on Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs). At this phase the author surveyed faculty and students about the effectiveness of various features of ALCs in facilitating students’ learning. Nine hundred and sixteen students and 53 faculty who were teaching and learning in these rooms responded to the two surveys. The surveys assessed how active learning classrooms may facilitate students’ collaboration, what features of these classrooms are more helpful, and whether there is a difference between faculty and students in terms of effectiveness of these classrooms’ features. The results showed that both students and faculty strongly believe in the usefulness of these environments, while there are some differences in terms of student and faculty perspectives towards these rooms. Considering the results of all three phases of this research, a list of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of groupwork and ALCs is offered at the end.
Active learning classrooms (ALCs) support teaching approaches that foster greater interaction and student engagement. However, a common challenge for instructors who teach in ALCs is to provide adequate assistance to students while implementing collaborative activities. This study examined the impact of teaching assistants in a large ALC. The results showed that incorporating teaching assistants increases students’ access to expert advice during small group activities; further, students view the teaching assistants as supportive of their success in the classroom. Therefore, availability of teaching assistants for instructors teaching in large ALCs must be considered along with classroom design and pedagogical approach.
The Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching ( DART ; Owens et al., 2017), a sound-based metric of learner-centeredness, is highly accessible, requires no training, and can be conducted with minimal classroom observations; yet, DART has not been evaluated in comparison with other validated metrics or in consideration of potentially confounding classroom characteristics (e.g. enrollment, classroom size, number of doors). We analyzed recordings from 42 class sessions of an undergraduate biology course with DART, the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), and nine classroom characteristics. We found that enrollment was the best single predictor of the DART output of learner-centeredness, percent Multiple Voice.
Institutions may invest heavily into building and equipping new learning teaching spaces with the intention of encouraging active and collaborative learning to occur. However, there may not be a concomitant shift in teachers’ existing pedagogical practices. This qualitative study examined the perspectives of thirty-two tertiary teachers across a range of disciplines at a single institution. The findings suggest that working in new collaborative learning spaces challenged many participants to make changes to their existing practices that moved them along a possible continuum to be more facilitative and learner-centered in their approach.
