Students’ responses to different first year science learning environments

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Research and Development in Higher Education Vol. 27: Transforming Knowledge into Wisdom Holistic Approaches to Teaching and Learning

July, 2004, 359 pages
Published by
ISBN
0 90 8557 58 2
Abstract 

One way of evaluating a learning situation is to investigate the psycho-social learning environment, which provides an indication of how students perceive the teaching, their learning and their relationships with others in the class. This research study compares two first year university science learning environments – a traditional lecture/tutorial-based mode and a workshop, studio mode. Students were surveyed using the University Social Constructivist Learning Environment Survey and results on two common assessment tasks were also collected. The data show that the studio learning environment was rated more highly on five of the six scales, Relevance, Negotiation, Leadership, Empathy and Support, indicating a higher degree of learner-centredness as perceived by students. Multidimensional scaling produced holistic spatial representations of the two learning environments revealing a closer match between the actual and preferred learning environments in the studio classes compared with the traditional classes. Comparisons between students’ assessment results and their preferred learning environment point to possible attitude differences between students in the different groups as well as between students with differing results in each group. This study raises questions about course design in science subjects.

Keywords: Learning environment; studio physics; learner-centredness; teaching and learning science.