Students’ perceptions of an innovative learning environment in higher education: an exploratory analysis
Abstract
The impact of innovative learning environments (ILE) on student’s satisfaction and performance has aroused high interest of research in recent years. Many educational providers, such as higher education institutions, have been doing efforts to redesign their learning spaces for enhancing the use of digital technologies, higher education’ teachers-students and peers’ collaboration and new educational methodologies. Following these guidelines for reconfiguring learning spaces that emerged from the need to develop 21st century skills, a redesign of an educational space was carried out in a Portuguese institution of higher education. Within the scope of CreativeLab_Sci&Math project, two traditional science classroom laboratories were transformed into flexible and technology-enriched environments aiming to enhance students’ engagement and foster their performance through active and interdisciplinary teaching methodologies. Thus, this preliminary study focused on identifying students’ perceptions about the attributes of this ILE, according to three main attributes: physical space (temperature, air quality, light, acoustics, visibility, space organization, furniture), technological (hardware and software) and pedagogical (active teaching methodologies, interdisciplinarity, pedagogical content knowledge, technologies, and interest for scientific content). For this purpose, a survey was applied to undergraduate students who frequently used the ILE. The results revealed that students valued the distinct attributes of CreativeLab_Sci&Math, which gives us insights about how they perceived space, technologies, and pedagogy in this ILE. Furthermore, the results allowed us to outline future research paths and improvement opportunities for enhancing the quality of teaching and learning and the well-being of students in the ILE.
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