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Creating a New Physics Education Learning Environment
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Resource A. What is a "Learning Environment"?
A learning environment is a place where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities (Wilson, 1995). Based on this definition, all courses are "learning environments," but not all courses are intentionally designed to achieve goals for student learning. The
bricoleursa
featured in the LT2 Web site are among the growing number of faculty who are designing their courses to achieve their goals for student learning. This is explained in the "learning environment" model below.
Model of a Learning Environment
Problems - Goals
First, consider more closely the relationships between typical problems that the featured bricoleurs experience and their goals for student learning. This relationship may be presented as follows, using the Joliet Junior College case study as an example:
Teaching Principles
Now, it is a big jump to go from a set of abstractly-stated goals, like those above, to the kind of complex, on-the-ground learning activities that we saw during our case study visits and that the bricoleurs and their students described. As the above Learning Environment model shows, the main steps linking faculty goals to effective learning activities are their teaching principles.
Typical of the teaching principles that guide the decisions of the faculty featured in the LT2 Web site are the following, which are drawn from the Joliet Junior College case study.
Of note, the teaching principles held by the LT2 bricoleurs are strongly consistent with the "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" that Zelda Gamson and Arthur Chickering synthesized from research on undergraduate education (1991). The teaching principles of the bricoleurs featured on the LT2 site also are consistent with a
constructivist
philosophy.b
Synergistic Set of Learning Activities
To implement their teaching principles, the faculty featured in our case studies have chosen a set of activities that they attempt to synergistically "weave together" to achieve their goals for student learning. We have organized these activities into the following three categories:
- Computer-dependent activities that faculty believe simply would not be possible, or at least not feasible, without computers. Examples include:
- hands-on experiments (real-time hands-on acquisition and analysis of data, using electronic probes, that provide connections to real-world events)
- visualization, graphical representation, and simulation
- Computer-improved activities that faculty believe work incrementally better with technology but can still be implemented without it. Examples include:
- the use of electronic response systems in large lectures, that enable individual students to vote on their answer to a multiple-choice question by pressing a button rather than raising a hand.
- the use of a course website rather than/in addition to paper to post the syllabus, hand-outs, and so forth.
- Computer-independent activities that can be done without technology. Examples include:
- group work/guided discussion, and
- formative assessment tasks.
To summarize, each learning environment created by the bricoleurs featured in the LT2 case studies consists of an integrated set of learning activities, some of which are computer-dependent and all of which implement the teaching principles that the instructors believe will achieve their goals for student learning.
Outcomes
Throughout the LT2 case studies, our picture of the learning environments developed by diverse bricoleurs is completed by "outcomes," a term that refers to four types of information that faculty use to determine how well their learning environment is achieving their goals:
- Student testimony - provides key insights into how students experience different activities.
- Instructor testimony - conveys instructor views about how, why and how well different activities implement his or her teaching principles and goals.
- Formative assessments - activities that simultaneously (1) provide instructors with feedback about how and what students are learning, which the instructors can then immediately use to adjust and improve their teaching efforts; and (2) foster student learning directly because the students in the process of performing such activities. (For more information, see the FLAG website, which features classroom assessment techniques that have been show to improve learning.)
- Summative assessments formal examinations or tests, the results of which are used by faculty to demonstrate, in a way that is definitive and visible to people outside the course, the degree to which students have accomplished the learning goals for a course.
a. A French term for a person who is adept at finding, or simply recognizing in their environment, resources that can be used to build something she or he believes is important and then putting resources together in a combination to achieve her or his goals.
b. According to Swandt, constructivism is a "philosophical perspective interested in the ways in which human beings individually and collectively interpret or construct the social and psychological world in specific linguistic, social, and historical contexts" (1997, p.19). During the last 20 or so years, cognitive psychologists (James Wertsch, Barbara Rogoff, and Jean Lave, among many others) have found that constructivist theories of how people construct meaning are closely aligned with their observations of how people learn: knowledge is mediated by social interactions and many other features of cultural environments.
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