Design Principles For Learning Environments Research Articles

Optimizing Health Professions Education through a Better Understanding of “School-Supported Clinical Learning”: A Conceptual Model

Interventions connecting school and clinical practice can align requirements and enhance learning outcomes. Current models and theories of clinical learning leave gaps in our knowledge about how learning processes and outcomes can be optimized by schools. In this paper, we discuss findings about threats and opportunities in the use of school standards, tools, and support in clinical learning, including underlying mechanisms, in the context of nursing education. Opportunities include competency frameworks that can challenge students to push their limits despite a task-oriented ward culture. Assignments and tools can deepen students’ understanding of patient care, help them compare different experiences and stimulate self-regulated learning. Threats include rigid performance criteria that guide students’ selection of learning opportunities, extensive written formats, and individualization of self-regulated learning. These threats can lead to added workload and disengagement. Based on the critically constructed argument that the role of schools in clinical learning should be acknowledged in the literature, we present a conceptual model to do so. The use of this model provides design principles for learning environments at the interface of school and practice within health professions education. Eventually, learning outcomes can be achieved efficiently without unnecessary interference with students’ engagement in patient care and student-supervisor interactions.

Teaching students to think spatially through embodied actions: Design principles for learning environments in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Spatial thinking is a vital component of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curriculum. However, to date, broad development of learning environments that target domain-specific spatial thinking is incomplete. The present article visits the problem of improving spatial thinking by first reviewing the evidence that the human mind is embodied: that cognition, memory, and knowledge representation maintain traces of sensorimotor impressions from acting and perceiving in a physical environment. In particular, we review the evidence that spatial cognition and the ways that humans perceive and conceive of space are embodied. We then propose a set of design principles to aid researchers, designers, and practitioners in creating and evaluating learning environments that align principled embodied actions to targets of spatial thinking in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

How Novice Science Teachers Appropriate Epistemic Discourses Around Model-Based Inquiry for Use in Classrooms

To test whether epistemically unproblematic ways of thinking and talking about science could be transformed during preservice teacher training, we designed a system of learning activities based on a set of heuristics for progressive disciplinary discourse (HPDD). The HPDD outline six design principles of learning environments where the aim is to foster learners' participation in material and discursive activities that characterize the work of scientists. After tracking participants through university coursework where the HPDD was employed and into their teaching practicums, we found that most came to reconceptualize the interrelated roles of models, theory, evidence, and argument. These ideas ultimately supported a shift in their goals for scientific investigation—from “proving” a hypothesis, to testing and revising explanatory models. Preliminary findings from teaching episodes with their own secondary students indicated that some participants took up “epistemically ambitious” classroom practices, pressing learners to develop testable models of natural phenomena and gather evidence to link observations with underlying explanatory processes.