Types Of Learning Environments Research Articles

Students' Perceptions of Different Tertiary Learning Environments

In this study of students' perceptions of six different tertiary learning environments, 1,249 students indicated the behaviours and practices that helped or hindered their learning and why. Irrespective of the type of learning environment, students felt that their learning was helped when learning experiences were practical and experiential. Students also felt that their learning was helped when the presentation and explanation were clear. These learning conditions clarified their understanding and consolidated their learning. Learning was hindered when the pace of presentation was inappropriately fast or slow and the presentation was unclear. Learning in each particular type of environment was also helped or hindered by conditions and behaviours idiosyncratic to that environment. These conditions and the reason for their effects are identified and discussed. Although many are predictable, they reinforce the notions, first, that different learning environments are designed to, and in practice do, produce different learning outcomes and, second, that students are capable of discriminating between what they consider to be good and bad educational experiences. What students regard as “good”, however, provides a challenge for tertiary educators and staff developers.

Determining preferred educational methods for neurological surgery residents regarding organ donation.

Design and implementation of professional education, especially physician education, continues to challenge procurement professionals. At the request of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the United Network for Organ Sharing undertook a project to develop educational materials for neurological surgery residents. A survey tool was developed and administered on site at 11 neurological surgery residency programs in the United States. The survey explored the types of learning environments, teaching methods, educational resources, and audiovisual aids that neurological surgery residents typically experience during their residency programs. In addition, the survey sought to uncover the residents' informational needs regarding organ and tissue donation presentations as well as their educational program preferences. Based on our findings, neurological surgery residents prefer presentations that are brief and to the point, that are easily understood, that require no reading, that contain limited important information, and that always include food.

Determining Preferred Educational Methods for Neurological Surgery Residents regarding Organ Donation

Design and implementation of professional education, especially physician education, continues to challenge procurement professionals. At the request of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the United Network for Organ Sharing undertook a project to develop educational materials for neurological surgery residents. A survey tool was developed and administered on site at 11 neurological surgery residency programs in the United States. The survey explored the types of learning environments, teaching methods, educational resources, and audiovisual aids that neurological surgery residents typically experience during their residency programs. In addition, the survey sought to uncover the residents' informational needs regarding organ and tissue donation presentations as well as their educational program preferences. Based on our findings, neurological surgery residents prefer presentations that are brief and to the point, that are easily understood, that require no reading, that contain limited important information, and that always include food.

Paired Keyboards as a Tool for Internet Exploration of Third Grade Students

This study focuses on the use of paired keyboards attached to a single microcomputer as a means to facilitate internet exploration. A classroom teacher with nineteen years experience and an educator worked with an intact third grade class of twenty-nine public school students. Children worked in pairs, with one child considered as the knowledgeable other who, through interaction with a partner, might extend the partner's Zone of Proximal Development. This type of learning environment allowed for selective intervention among groups which facilitated and accelerated internet exploration and made the experience a much more successful and rewarding one. Interviews along with ongoing weekly observations were employed to examine this scaffolding approach while the students were on-line. The use of paired keyboards become, in a Vygotskian sense, a tool in children's learning. Review of the process indicated that this approach enabled students who were unfamiliar with either computers or the internet to be successful in their quest for information and global collaboration. The implication is that meaningful learning takes place when educators are creative in the way that computer hardware/software is used in support of facilitating education through internet exploration.

Problem Framing through Gaming: Learning to Manage Complexity, Uncertainty, and Value Adjustment

In social systems, an almost limitless number of social issues exist that cannot be dealt with in isolation. Traditional professional knowledge is not well suited to coping with complex and unique situations. Problem solving as encountered in mathematics and physics brings forward a narrow, technical rationality, emphasizing a rationalist framework for interpreting knowledge. The related problem-solving strategies are too limited in scope. They disregard competing frameworks based on multiple perceptions. It is against this background of multiple realities that gaming will be discussed. Gaming, in the historicist tradition, provides a suitable approach for dealing with competing frameworks. It has proven to be a powerful combination of methods that can deal with complex, uncertain, and unique issues, and with value adjustments. Gaming provides a language for combining the social-human with the physical, technological, and economic knowledge domains. To connect these knowledge domains, three types of learning environments are distinguished.

Learning in context: Extensively computerized work groups as communities-of-practice

As computing becomes increasingly integral to organizational life, how work groups learn to successfully use computing becomes a critical issue. The current focus in the management information systems literature is on individual training and teaching methods. The context in which people and groups learn is overlooked in these studies. But work groups provide different types of learning environments, some which encourage learning while others discourage it. Three characteristics of work group environments help explain why learning varies: differential valuation of work roles in organizations (clerical vs professional work groups); differential participation in legitimate peripheral learning (through the presence of local expertise and time to interact and learn); and differential levels of participation in noncanonical communities-of-practice (especially through grass roots computing implementations). Two contrasting case studies illustrate how these concepts result in different learning environments. Professional work groups are more highly valued in organizations and members are given more autonomy to participate in legitimate peripheral learning and emerging communities-of-practice, while clerical groups are less valued, isolated from other practitioners and more rigorously held to canonical work practices. Participation in computing implementations also provides opportunities for learning that are missing in groups that have computing forced on them by management.

Supporting hypothesis generation by learners exploring an interactive computer simulation

Computer simulations provide environments enabling exploratory learning. Research has shown that these types of learning environments are promising applications of computer assisted learning but also that they introduce complex learning settings, involving a large number of learning processes. This article reports on an instrument for supporting one of these learning processes: stating hypotheses. The resulting instrument, an hypothesis scratchpad, was designed on the basis of a conceptual representation of the simulation model and tested in an experimental study. In this study three versions of the scratchpad, varying in structure, were compared. It was found that support offered for identifying variables, in the form of a selection list, is relatively successful: students who used this list were better in differentiating different types of variables. For identifying relations, a selection list of relations offered to the students proved unhelpful in finding accurate relations: students using this list stated their hypotheses mainly at a very global level. The research reported was conducted in the project SIMULATE. SIMULATE was part of SAFE, a R&D project partially funded by the CEC under contract D1014 within the Exploratory Action of the DELTA programme. The work of SIMULATE is continued in the DELTA main phase project SMISLE.

Some Applications of Interactive Video in Initial Teacher Training

This paper describes disc‐based interactive video applications in initial teacher training which have arisen out of materials developed under the Interactive Video in Schools Project and Interactive Video in Education Awareness Scheme, sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry. Interactive video is examined in the context of applications in five types of learning environment; as a presentation system for conventional lecturing or small‐group teaching, as a vehicle for independent student learning, as a resource for students on teaching practice, as an information source and as a surrogate tutor. In each case development work is described and future possibilities are discussed.

Teaching Clinical Epidemiology: A Controlled Trial of Two Methods

The teaching of clinical epidemiology to second-year students at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine is carried out using journal articles to illustrate concepts. Because of the need for discussion, the instructors believed that the concepts of epidemiology might best be learned by, and that greater satisfaction with the learning process might be derived from, small group discussions rather than large lecture sessions. To test these hypotheses, students were randomized into either one of two discussion groups or a larger lecture group. The course handouts and text were identical, and the three instructors presented the same material successively to each group. In the final examination, all three groups answered approximately 26 of 36 questions correctly. Seventy percent of students responded to a questionnaire at the end of the course. There were no significant differences between the discussion and lecture groups in their ability to read and understand medical articles. However, the discussion group students were more favorable in their assessment of the success of the teaching method and in their perception of the importance and overall quality of the course. While there may be little difference in the short-term retention of epidemiological principles between the two teaching methods, the greater satisfaction reported by the students in the small groups will stimulate us to try to provide that type of learning environment in the future.

Crowding and Classroom Learning,

The effects of density and other situational factors on perceptions of and responses to crowding in classroom learning environments was examined in three separate and concurrent investigations. Experiment I examined the effects of various demographic variables, learning environments, and room design variables on perceptions of ideal, crowded, and intolerable learning conditions. Results indicated that all subjects agreed on what constitutes an ideal learning environment while perceptions of crowded and intolerable learning conditions depended on the subject’s vocational perspective (e.g., teacher, student, administrator, etc.). Effects were also observed for type of learning environment as well as room design variables (noise level, ceiling height, and esthetic quality of the room). These latter effects, however, were weaker and conditional on sex of subject. In Experiment II, the effect of two levels of density on classroom achievement was examined in the laboratory. Two levels of motivation and three le...

Involvement and integration

Since American open education has been so strongly influenced by practices in Great Britain, it is logical to turn there for our first look at how music functions in this type of learning environment. Marie Westervelt, like most other authors in this issue, has seen the British schools in action and thus is able to dispel some common myths through first-hand knowledge. One idea to be exploded is that everything in an informal classroom is individualized and that there is no way to develop performing groups. Not so. In the integrated day, there are numerous opportunities for instrumental lessons, regular ensemble experiences, skill development, and broad participation. The author is presently completing doctoral studies at Syracuse University, New York.—Ed.