Designing for How We Learn: How We Got Here

Learning today is a round-the-clock activity. Learners have easy access to information and the technology and tools to access it. Information from endless sources is at our fingertips, so how do physical spaces contribute to our ability to learn? 

Does the Physical Classroom Still Matter?

Today, nearly every university offers a plethora of online courses, blended and flipped curriculum and distance learning scenarios. While there was initial skepticism related to the quality of some online programs, such as massive online open courses (MOOCs), more sophisticated programs are now emerging. At Georgia Tech, you can get an online undergraduate degree in computer science for $7000.¹“Competency-based” degrees, where students advance based on demonstrated mastery of skills or retention of knowledge instead of time spent with the course materials, are quickly gaining traction — with around 600 institutions (including community colleges and baccalaureate, comprehensive and research colleges and universities) considering implementing programs such as these in the near future.² This model calls fundamental concepts such as “credit hours” into question.  

So what makes it worth it to physically attend a university, or even a class anymore, anyway? Design professionals and university facility professionals need to wake up to a sobering reality: many of the variables that impact learning have changed dramatically, and learning environments must change too.

Ninety percent of what neuroscientists have discovered about how people learn has been discovered in the last twenty years.  We need to design learning environments that can flex with the diverse ways we learn. 

Foundational Research on the Science of Learning

In 2000, a report called How People Learn was published by the National Academies Press, which resulted from research into the science of learning and how to translate those findings into effective practice in the classroom.³ While an update to this report is anticipated in 2017, the initial findings transformed the thinking of educators about what they should be doing to teach effectively. There were three basic principles:​ 

1. Students do not come into the classroom as a “blank slate.” They have (right or wrong) preconceptions about the world, and their initial understanding affects their mastery of everything after it. The effective teacher must elicit this initial understanding, straighten out misconceptions if they exist and then build on that understanding. 
2. Learning a collection of facts is not enough. To develop competence, students must not only have factual knowledge; they must understand these facts within a conceptual framework and organize this knowledge in ways that allow them to retrieve it in other contexts.  
3. Students need to be taught a “metacognitive” approach to their own learning so they can become successful monitors of their own learning and, thus, hopefully, life-long learners. They need to recognize when they have a grasp of their target knowledge and when more information is required, whether the new information is consistent with what they already know, and what analogies can be drawn that help deepen understanding. 

How People Learn advanced a revolutionary insistence that the simple delivery of lectures, full of facts and material to memorize, was not a successful mode of teaching. The book advocated that teachers could “choose more purposefully among techniques to accomplish specific goals.”  These techniques included lecture-based, skills-based, inquiry-based, Individual vs. group and technology-enhanced delivery methods. 

At that time, these were seen as separate tools an instructor could pick from, depending on the subject matter and mastery. A successful learning environment allows the use of numerous techniques within the same classroom or class period. For that to be possible, the classroom of the future has to look very different from the classroom of the past.  

Additional research into how people learn⁴ has delivered a few points of note:

• Learning is about making connections.
• Learning is developmental; it is about fitting in the new information with what one already has, adjusting any misconceptions and moving on. 
• Learning is an active search for meaning, constructing one’s own knowledge rather than passively receiving it . 

Moving Beyond Four-Walled Classrooms with Tablet Armchairs

Today, since students have such easy and broad access to “information,” a teacher cannot simply be a supplier of information. Gone are the days when the faculty member did not feel successful unless half the class had dropped the course during the first week. They must be a guide and teach the student the “metacognitive” model described earlier. In addition to presenting students with the initial concepts, the teacher must help them understand when they’ve “got it” and when to go further, how these new concepts fit in with what they already know, and how new concepts can be applied to new situations. The classroom or laboratory environment has to contribute to the student experience, not hinder it.  

In this article series, we'll outline how learning environments can enhance how students learn and how this applies to classrooms, teaching labs and auditoria. 

Citations:

1. Carey, K. (2016, September 28). An online education breakthrough? A Master's degree for a mere $7,000. New York Times. Retrieved from:  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/upshot/an-online-education-breakthro…
2. Public Agenda. (2015). A research brief on the survey on the shared design elements & emerging practices of competency-based education programs. 
3. National Research Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school: Expanded edition. National Academies Press.
4. Scott-Webber, L. (2004). In sync: Environmental behavior research and the design of learning spaces. Society for College and University Planning.

Read more from Kim's Designing For How We Learn Series.

• One Simple Mantra
  "See + Hear + Do = Remember" is the mantra we apply when designing educational spaces. In this article, we explore each step in the process. 
• Lecture Halls
  Applying the "See + Hear + Do = Remember" framework to lecture halls requires some exploration into how they will be used.  
• Classrooms
  Active learning is prolific in today's classroom environments. We explore how to ensure our learning environments support it using the "See + Hear + Do = Remember" framework.  
• Maker Spaces and Instructional Laboratories
  Maker spaces and instructional laboratories inherently support active learning. We explore the variety of maker spaces and teaching labs and how we can design the most useful and creative spaces.