How Do Classroom Environments Affect Learning

Chapter 6. The Psychology of Learning Environments

Ken A. Graetz

Winona State University

He emerged into the strangest-looking classroom he had e'er seen. In fact, it didn't look like a classroom at all, more similar a cross between someone'southward attic and an old-fashioned tea shop. At least twenty small, round tables were crammed inside it, all surrounded by chintz armchairs and fat little poufs. Everything was lit with a dim, carmine light; the curtains at the windows were all closed, and the many lamps were draped with ruddy scarves. It was stiflingly warm, and the fire that was called-for under the crowded mantelpiece was giving off a heavy, sickly sort of perfume every bit it heated a large copper kettle. The shelves running effectually the circular walls were crammed with dusty-looking feathers, stubs of candles, many packs of tattered playing cards, countless silvery crystal balls, and a huge array of teacups.¹

The Ecology Psychology of Teaching and Learning

This enchanting description of a classroom at the fictitious Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry captures iii fundamental ideas from the environmental psychology of teaching and learning. Get-go, all learning takes place in a concrete environment with quantifiable and perceptible physical characteristics. Whether sitting in a large lecture hall, underneath a tree, or in front of a figurer screen, students are engulfed by environmental information. Specific targets inside the environment draw the students' attention, such equally armchairs, scarves, and teacups, and they continuously monitor the ambience properties such equally the light of the lamps, the odor of the kettle, and the warmth of the burn. In whatsoever learning environment students are awash in environmental information, just a small-scale fraction of which constitutes the sights and sounds of instruction.

2d, students practise not touch, see, or hear passively; they feel, look, and mind actively. Students cannot nourish to all the environmental information bombarding them at any given time; their ability to assemble and understand incoming information is express. Through automatic and controlled processes, students select information for consideration. They try to empathize what they are sensing by piecing bits of information together from the bottom upward and by applying existing thoughts and preconceptions from the top downward. A classroom with round tables and comfy armchairs may wait strange because information technology deviates from expectations formed through prior experience. Students may straight their attention to item targets in the learning environment that they find more interesting, of import, or unfamiliar than others. For some, it might be the instructor's engaging chemistry sit-in. For others, it may exist the silvery crystal ball on the shelf. In any learning environs, students manage their limited cognitive resources by actively selecting environmental data for further consideration and by using existing knowledge structures to interpret this information in ways that have worked previously.

Third, the physical characteristics of learning environments can bear on learners emotionally, with important cognitive and behavioral consequences. Although emotional reactions to ecology stimuli have been shown to vary widely beyond individuals and activities, most students would probably detect learning difficult in a classroom that is stiflingly warm. Conversely, environments that elicit positive emotional responses may atomic number 82 not only to enhanced learning but likewise to a powerful, emotional attachment to that infinite. Information technology may get a place where students love to larn, a place they seek out when they wish to acquire, and a identify they remember fondly when they reflect on their learning experiences. In college didactics, we hope to provide such places for our students to acquire, fifty-fifty as nosotros build yet another large lecture hall and attempt to squeeze our students into crowded, noisy, and uncomfortable spaces. Conspicuously, some learning environments are more comfortable and offering fewer distractions than others. In any learning environment, concrete characteristics that cause discomfort can be expected to interfere with learning; environments that produce positive emotional states tin be expected to facilitate learning and the development of identify attachment.

The areas of psychology that relate almost directly to classroom design and learning environments are environmental, educational, human factors (technology), and social psychology. Previous inquiry on the furnishings of such environmental variables equally calorie-free, temperature, and noise on learning has yielded some anticipated results that are addressed through traditional classroom blueprint. Learning appears to be affected adversely by inadequate lite, farthermost temperatures, and loud noises—variables maintained inside acceptable ranges in almost college classrooms. Other results, yet, reverberate the frequently circuitous, subtle, and surprising coaction between the learner and the learning environment. Years of research on the affect of environmental variables on human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors indicate that other variables often moderate the effects of environmental variables. In a summary of the research on educational environments, Weinstein² concluded that environmental variables tin touch learners indirectly and that the effects of unlike physical settings often depend on the nature of the task and the learner. For example, distracting noises announced to slow reaction fourth dimension and degrade performance to a greater degree in older versus younger adults³ and for introverts to a greater degree than extraverts.^four

Research on the impact of information applied science on learning environments is not as voluminous. The presence and application of engineering changes the learning environment, both directly and indirectly. This chapter focuses on the psychological underpinnings of three such changes with major implications for the design of higher learning environments:

the increased presence of personal, networked devices (for example, wireless laptops and cellular phones) in the classroom,
the migration of course content to the Spider web and the subsequent transition in classroom activeness from information commitment to collaboration, and
the increasing importance of virtual learning environments.

Devices and Distraction in College Classrooms

Laptops and other mobile devices take cracking potential to enhance and transform education and are being used effectively in many higher classrooms.⁵ Today's students use their devices in class to take notes, access materials and applications, and find relevant information. When all students in a classroom can admission networked tools simultaneously, many collaborative learning and just-in-time instruction opportunities emerge. At that place is a dark side to the presence of personal, networked devices in course, however—when students use them to engage in activities unrelated to coursework.

Students take always found ways, other than listening to the instructor, to pass the time during class. Crossword puzzles, doodling, and daydreams accept occupied students' minds during more classes than we care to acknowledge. At first glance, it appears that the wireless laptop, PDA, iPod, and cellular phone are simply the crossword puzzles of today's college classrooms. As suggested by the comments below, however, the issue is more circuitous. Yesterday's students did not take 24 x seven online admission to all of the content presented during a typical lecture-based class, did not find the crossword puzzle being tackled by the student sitting next to them particularly distracting, and were not themselves as tempted by a crossword puzzle every bit by instant messaging or an immersive online game. In add-on, a handful of students in a large lecture hall working on crossword puzzles did not change the physical environment for instructors.

When a teacher is upwardly at that place reading his slides and I can go home and wait at them afterward, Solitaire tin can be a temptation—permit alone my email messages that I'one thousand checking. It's kind of a blunt truth, only sitting in the back of the classroom, it's not just me. You look around and all you run into is Solitaire, e-mail.⁶

The computers interfere with making eye contact. Yous've got this lookout man fence between yous and the students.^seven

In addition to the sensory richness of Web sites and online games, today's mobile devices convey social information, 1 of the well-nigh powerful targets of attention. We seem particularly attuned to this data, whether studying people's faces and body movements or listening to people talk. In addition, the software applications used to mediate communication are designed to grab the user'south attending. Microsoft MSN Messenger, a popular instant messaging client, provides a visible and aural betoken when a member of your buddy list starts the awarding and when a message is received. Information technology has a "nudge" feature that presents a distinctive sound and animation when you want to attract the attention of a buddy, shaking the messaging window back and forth on the buddy's screen. It has a "wink" feature that allows you lot to transport animations to a buddy, such as the large fix of knuckles illustrated in Figure 1 that appear to rap on the inside of your buddy'due south screen. Even if students make every endeavour to pay attention to the instructor, instant messaging applications are designed to capture their attention, and the social information conveyed is probably too attracting for almost students to ignore.

Figure 1. MSN Messenger "Wink"
Figure 1. MSN Messenger 'Wink'

To better empathise the potential of today's mobile devices to distract students, it may be helpful to review some of the bones principles of attention.⁸ Attention is peradventure all-time represented non as a unmarried procedure but equally an organized set of procedures through which we select specific ecology stimuli or inputs for cognitive processing.^nine It is commonly held that simply 1 input is processed consciously. This could be called the attended input. All other ecology stimuli (for example, groundwork noise, the temperature of the room) are processed unconsciously. These are the unattended inputs. Unconscious monitoring detects changes in inputs to which we are not attending consciously, just that might be of import. What constitutes an important modify is probably determined by another process, referred to here equally the attention controller, which may push the information into conscious awareness.¹⁰ This might outcome in the selection of a new attended input, a shift in attention perceived as either controlled and selective or unexpected and distracting.

We have all experienced the sudden conscious awareness of an unattended input. The and then-called cocktail political party event¹¹ occurs when you hear your proper name mentioned somewhere in a crowded room as yous engage in a discussion with someone else. Even as yous attend to the give-and-take, presumably you lot monitor other sounds in the room unconsciously. Your attending controller detects an important stimulus—your name—which causes you lot to shift your conscious attending away from your discussion.

Using these basic concepts, the distracting nature of mobile devices in the classroom tin can be recast. Given two potential inputs, the instructor or a laptop screen displaying a game of Solitaire, some students select the instructor as the attended input and the laptop every bit the unattended input. Those who are trying to listen to their instructor and detect their attention captured by their own or another student'south laptop screen are distracted by that device. This can be problematic in a classroom environment, every bit information technology interferes with students' power to process course-related information and prevents them from obtaining an outcome (specifically, learning) they desire and expect to receive, a common cause of frustration, anger, and aggression.¹² This emotional response is probably more pronounced when students are distracted by others' devices over which they accept no control.

As much as we promise that all students select their instructors every bit the primary target of their attention during class, nosotros know that some choose the game of Solitaire, relegating the teacher to the status of unattended input. This is ofttimes described erroneously every bit distraction. In fact, these students are not distracted by their devices; they have selected them for attention. If anything, these students may find themselves distracted by the instructor. This is probably what passes every bit multitasking for many students. They attend to e-mail, instant messages, and other unrelated, device-based information during class, while monitoring the instructional stream unconsciously. Their attention controllers are prepare to respond to important signals, such equally the phrase, "This will exist on the test." In the classroom version of the cocktail party result, students' attention then snaps to the instructor.

Although the challenge in this case is one of educatee motivation, not distraction, the two are closely related. Every bit more students decide to instant message or play online games during class, the book and variety of potentially distracting environmental information increases, making it more difficult for motivated learners to nourish to the instructor. What impact does this have on classroom pattern? Commencement and foremost, instructors must exist able to engage students in the learning process during class time, and classrooms must be designed to facilitate that date. It is difficult for students to attend to other activities when they are talking to an instructor, working on a group activity, or using their devices for bookish purposes. Instead of banning instant messaging in class, instructors might be supported in their utilise of this and other social technologies to facilitate class-related discussion and collaborative work.

Attempting to prohibit the use of devices in course through edict or infrastructure (for example, installing an Internet kill switch) is costly and does trivial to address the underlying problem. It is preferable to design classrooms and classroom calculating policies that permit instructors to exercise greater social control. In the case of laptops in the classroom, screens should be easily visible to instructors equally they walk around the room, and instructors should exist able to display any student's laptop screen to a public screen at a moment's notice. In large classes, software that allows instructors to view thumbnail images of each pupil's screen (for example, DyKnow Monitor or SMART SynchronEyes) may too exist useful. Although nigh instructors are probably not interested in spending time on what feels like student surveillance, the mere presence of these methods combined with clear classroom policies offers a good classroom management solution that lets students continue using their devices for academic purposes.

Through their behavior, some students are telling us that they feel neither the need nor the desire to pay close attending to the instructor during some classes. Generally speaking, this is aught new. However, those responsible for designing learning spaces should exist enlightened that today'due south incarnation of this problem requires additional study. Today's devices are colliding with yesterday's methods. What takes place in a college classroom is changing, due in large part to the very information applied science that gives some instructors and administrators crusade for concern. The classroom is no longer a place where data is delivered to passive students. A growing number of students get that information elsewhere and do not expect to hear it repeated verbatim in class. Instead, the classroom is becoming an interactive, collaborative surround where knowledge is created actively by students, many of whom have devices that are equally much a part of them equally their own pare and that can be a very important part of this process.

Collaboration in the Classroom

Although planning for data projection and network access is an of import office of today's classroom design process, information technology is likely to have an even greater indirect effect on how fixed-site classrooms are used in the future. The migration to the Web of the content traditionally delivered by instructors in lecture format is helping shift the function served by brick-and-mortar classrooms from information delivery to collaboration and word. Collaborative learning refers to a wide multifariousness of "educational activities in which human relationships are the primal to welfare, achievement, and mastery," wherein faculty "assistance students learn by working together on substantive bug."^thirteen Surveys betoken that lecture is still the most common instructional method used by college educators in the United States.^xiv Nonetheless, the transition from lecture to collaboration is well under way.

What bear on does this take on classroom design? This central change will challenge designers to create environments that facilitate collaborative activities. Instead of theaters where students lookout man instructors perform, classrooms must be flexible coming together places. Bruffee^xv described the ideal classroom for collaborative learning:

A level floor, movable seats, chalkboards on iii or iv walls, controlled acoustics (acoustical-tiled ceilings and carpeted floors), and no central seminar table (or one that can be pushed well out of the manner without threatening an assail of lumbago). An alternative is six to 10 movable iv- or v-sided tables of roughly card-tabular array size.

This description implies a maximum class size of l students. The question of classroom density is an important one: Researchers accept explored the psychological and educational effects of classroom density, both spatial (the size of the room) and social (the number of students). In their meta-analysis of 77 different studies on this issue, Glass and Smith^sixteen concluded that higher social density results in lower educatee achievement. When designing collaborative classrooms, a skilful social density criterion is 3 to 5 groups of 6 to 12 students each. Spatial density should exist such that both students and instructors have enough room to motion easily from grouping to group (specifically, four to 7 feet betwixt groups). Designers should also pay conscientious attention to the degree to which students feel crowded in a classroom. The experience of crowding in educational settings appears related to personal infinite violation.¹⁷ Research suggests that groups of students tin exist expected to work together most effectively at personal distances of 2 to 4 anxiety without feeling crowded.

Although class size is a limiting factor when implementing certain collaborative learning activities comfortably, small group collaboration and discussion are easier to manage in large classes than many instructors realize. Informal pocket-sized group techniques like think-pair-share,¹⁸ wherein students call up briefly about a question posed by the teacher, discuss their thoughts with a educatee sitting side by side to them, and so share their joint thoughts with the class, are feasible in big classes¹⁹ and tin be facilitated by technology. More formal activities such as jigsaw groups and structured controversy can also appoint students in large classes.²⁰

Classroom response systems or "clickers" are used by a growing number of instructors to gather student feedback and stimulate in-class word. In classes that allow group network access, a broad variety of groupware tools can back up collaboration in groups of all sizes. DyKnow Vision allows students to view and comment instructor whiteboard activity in existent time. Instructors tin then invite students to the virtual whiteboard, displaying their work to the entire form. GroupSystems is a suite of tools for supporting thought generation, organization, and evaluation in face-to-face and distributed groups.

Virtual Learning Environments

Today'south students spend an increasing amount of their fourth dimension peering at reckoner screens. These virtual environments have concrete characteristics that are but as existent as those of a dormitory room or a brick-and-mortar classroom, and students can become merely as fastened to them. On one end of the continuum are virtual worlds that emulate a natural, multidimensional environment. Many students subscribe to massive multiplayer online games such equally Globe of Warcraft, wherein they develop personas or "avatars," travel from town to town, acquire property, come across other people, and solve problems. On the other end of the spectrum are the online piece of work spaces that students employ every solar day, such as form management systems and campus portals. Somewhere in between are applications such as Facebook and MySpace, or persistent, customizable, social spaces that lack the immersive qualities of virtual worlds but are more than open, recreational, and social than campus work spaces.

Although many administrators and instructors are familiar with grade management systems and campus portals, fewer have experience with virtual worlds and may question their academic relevance. A good case of a virtual world used as a classroom is Second Life, an online environs designed to support creativity, collaboration, commerce, and entertainment. Although members tin can play games in this earth, the environs itself is not a game in the traditional sense. Instead, it is an open environment (what some telephone call synthetic reality) where members can interact with each other and build things (for case, buildings, games, vesture, furniture) for utilize inside the virtual world. A growing community of educators uses Second Life for instructional purposes. In autumn 2005, the School of Architecture at The Academy of Texas at Austin used Second Life in the class Designing Digital Communities, and Southern New Hampshire University used it in Introduction to International Concern. Figure 2 shows a snapshot of my 2d Life avatar, Hoptoad Flan, enjoying a relaxing moment.

Figure ii. Second Life Avatar Hoptoad Flan
Figure 2. Second Life Avatar Hoptoad Flan

What impact does this have on classroom design? First, campuses can expect the boundaries between virtual and brick-and-mortar learning environments to proceed to blur. Students and instructors will need access to their virtual learning environments while seated in their brick-and-mortar classrooms. Second, as campuses accept the notion that virtual spaces are actually classrooms, they tin brainstorm to employ the same care and consideration to decisions almost course direction systems and campus portals every bit they do to decisions about new construction and renovation. Of utmost importance is the usability of these virtual spaces.

A popular model of usability²¹ identifies five criteria for defining a usable system:

Learnability refers to the speed and ease with which a novice user can achieve proficiency with the organisation.
Efficiency refers to the degree to which the system supports the operation of an experienced user in the shortest corporeality of time and with the fewest steps.
Memorability refers to the degree to which a user, peculiarly an intermittent or casual user, can recollect how to accomplish a task using the system, the steps of which were learned previously.
Errors refer to the number of mistakes and missteps fabricated by users.
Satisfaction refers to the users' overall emotional experience when using the organisation.
Careful, objective usability analyses of mutual digital environments should be conducted and problems should be addressed using like decision-making processes and with the aforementioned sense of urgency that campuses use when addressing poor conditions in brick-and-mortar classrooms.

College Classrooms of Mystery and Enchantment

As students enter a virtual or brick-and-mortar learning environment, they form a cognitive impression of that space and feel an associated emotional response, simply as Harry Potter did when he entered his Divination classroom. People'southward preference for specific environments appears to depend on their cognitive impression. Kaplan and Kaplan²² suggested four cognitive determinants of environmental preference:

Coherence, or the ease with which a setting can be organized cognitively
Complexity, or the perceived capacity of the setting to occupy interest and stimulate action
Legibility, or perceived ease of use
Mystery, or the perception that entering the setting would lead to increased learning, interaction, or interest

An interesting add-on to this list might be the concept of enchantment. Bennett²³ described enchantment every bit the experience of beingness "both caught up and carried away." When enchanted past what we are experiencing, we are held spellbound, our senses seem heightened,²⁴ and we are caught in a moment of pure presence that we try to maintain.²⁵

Students probably detect today'south brick-and-mortar college classrooms quite coherent and legible. They make perfect sense to those who look to sit, facing forward, and listen quietly. Virtual learning environments may lack some of this coherence and legibility but are probably perceived as more circuitous and mysterious. What of enchantment? Our students are enchanted by works of art, musical performances, and breathtaking landscapes, but do they find our learning environments enchanting? We can all recall our favorite classroom and our favorite place to study as students. We all relate to Harry Potter walking into a classroom on the first mean solar day of schoolhouse and experiencing a sense of awe and wonder at the feathers, stubs of candles, packs of tattered playing cards, and silverish crystal balls on the shelves. It is possible to build learning environments from both brick-and-mortar and bits-and-bytes that draw students in and elicit a sense of mystery and enchantment. As we respond to the increased presence of networked devices, the transition from lecture to collaboration, and the growing importance of virtual environments and build the classrooms of the future that facilitate usability, appointment, collaboration, and learning, we would do well to remember what it was about learning environments that enchanted us and commit ourselves to preserving, restoring, and creating those experiences for our own students.

Endnotes

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (New York: Scholastic Press, 1999), p. 101.
Ballad South. Weinstein, "The Concrete Environment of School: A Review of the Enquiry," Review of Educational Research, vol. 49, no. four (Autumn 1979), pp. 577–610.
Richard J. Jennings, Robert Nebs, and Kay Brock, "Retentivity Retrieval in Noise and Psychophysiological Response in the Young and Old," Psychophysiology, vol. 25, no. 6 (1988), pp. 633–644.
Russell G. Geen, Eugene J. McCown, and James W. Broyles, "Furnishings of Noise on Sensitivity of Introverts and Extraverts to Signals in a Vigilance Chore," Personality and Private Differences, vol. vi, no. two (1985), pp. 237–241.
Linda B. Nilson and Barbara Due east. Weaver, eds., New Directions for Teaching and Learning: Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).
"AskTheStudents.com: four Views from the Frontline," Chronicle of Higher Education, December nine, 2005; available by subscription at <[http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i16/16b01501.htm]>.
"Law Professor Bans Laptops in Class, Over Student Protest," USAToday.com, March 21, 2006, <http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-21-professor-laptop-ban_x.htm>.
The cerebral science of attending and consciousness is a large area of written report. There is considerable debate inside the field over the processes involved. The model and ideas presented hither are generalizations and represent but one approach. Those interested in learning more should consult Harold E. Pashler, The Psychology of Attention (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998); Raja Parasuraman, ed., The Attentive Encephalon (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998; and Elizabeth A. Styles, The Psychology of Attending (East Sussex, U.K.: Psychology Press Ltd., 1997).
Arnold L. Drinking glass, Keith J. Holyoak, and John. Fifty. Santa, Cognition (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1979).
Ibid.
E. Collin Red, "Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and Two Ears," Journal of the Acoustical Lodge of America, vol. 25, no. 5 (September 1953), pp. 975–979, <http://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/ten.1121/ane.1907229>.
Leonard Berkowitz, "Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Examination and Reformulation," Psychological Bulletin, vol. 106, no. one (1989), pp. 59–73.
Kenneth A. Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Didactics, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, second Ed. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Printing, 1999).
Donald A. Bligh,What'southward the Use of Lectures? (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
Bruffee, op. cit., p. 259.
Gene 5. Glass and Mary Fifty. Smith, "Meta-Analysis of Research on the Relationship of Class Size and Achievement," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 1, no. 1 (1979), pp. 2–16.
Yakov M. Epstein and Robert A. Karlin, "Effects of Acute Experimental Crowding," Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 5, no. i (1975), pp. 34–53.
Frank Lyman, "The Responsive Class Discussion," in Mainstreaming Digest, A. Southward. Anderson, ed. (College Park, Physician.: University of Maryland College of Education, 1981).
James L. Cooper and Pamela P. Robinson, "Getting Started: Informal Small-Grouping Strategies in Large Classes," in New Directions for Educational activity and Learning—Strategies for Energizing Large Classes: From Small Groups to Learning Communities, Jean MacGregor et al., eds. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), pp. 17–24.
Karl A. Smith, "Structured Controversy," Engineering Didactics, vol. 74, no. v (1984), pp. 306–309.
Jakob Neilson, Usability Engineering (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 1993).
Stephen Kaplan and Rachael Kaplan, Cognition and Environment: Operation in an Uncertain Earth (New York: Praeger, 1982).
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, Due north.J.: The Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 5.
John McCarthy and Peter Wright, "The Enchantments of Engineering," in Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment, Marking A. Blythe et al., eds. (The netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), pp. 81–ninety.
Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Near the Author

Ken A. Graetz is the manager of e-learning at Winona Land University, where he is engaged in the development of learning opportunities for WSU kinesthesia and staff members, e-learning projection management and support, and numerous research and evolution projects. His enquiry interests include team and group dynamics, social knowledge, psychometrics, and calculator-supported collaborative work. Graetz received a PhD in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992.