The Learning Environment

Experential Learning

What role does your experience play in your learning process? Learning from experience is the process whereby human development occurs.

Although experience is essential to learning, it is not enough; one has to do something with it to construct knowledge. The two basic dimensions of the learning process include both understanding and transforming experience. At any given moment, your learning involves one or a combination of these four learning modes.

Cooperative Learning

Students who work in small groups, even when interacting with high-tech equipment, learn significantly more than students who work primarily alone. Cooperative learning is not a new concept. Extensive research, initiated in the late 1800s, has shown the advantages of cooperative learning over competitive and individualistic learning in various learning characteristics. These include: high-level reasoning; generation of new ideas and solutions; positive attitudes toward subject, instructor, and learning experience; motivation for learning; personal responsibility; commitment and caring for fellow students; and student retention.

Cooperative learning, which means students working together to achieve common goals, has five basic elements:

The Cooperative learning environment expects:

	1. Formulation. This encourages individual reflection and organization of thoughts.
	2. Sharing. One member shares his or her solution with the group. This provides opportunities to practice and improve oral presentation skills. This task is rotated among the members of the group.
	3. Listening. The members of the group listen carefully to the presentation. Take notes, but do not interrupt the presentation. Being a good listener is another important interpersonal skill.
	4. Creativity. Creates its solution by analyzing, questioning, testing, and synthesizing the individual conclusions.
	5. Critique. It is important to learn to be critical of ideas without being critical of people. It is important that we all monitor our group activities, obtain feedback, and intervene when we think it is necessary.

Attention and Learning

What do you notice about the space you are in? Why does a certain lighting or activity annoy you while others might enhance your perception of the world around you? Why are your responses to certain places different from your friend's and family's responses? How do these preferences dictate your environmental choices?

Understanding human behavior starts with understanding how people notice their environment. This includes at least two kinds of stimuli: those that involuntarily, even distractingly, command human notice, as well as those places, things or ideas to which humans must voluntarily, and with some effort (and resulting fatigue), direct their awareness. Improving and helping one another voluntarily direct our attention is a major factor in maintaining human effectiveness.

Perception and Learning

What do you remember of the places you've been?

How do these memories of past environments influence how you perceive your present locations?

How we image and engage with the the natural and built environment dictates how we will learn within its locale.

Information is stored in the brain as spatial networks called cognitive maps.

These structures link oneÕs recall of experiences with perception of present events, ideas and emotions. We know and think about the environment through these neural networks which enable us to plan and carry out our intentions.

What we know about our environment is more than an external reality in that we perceive with prior knowledge and expectations.

Our external reality is in fact less incumbering in that we record only a portion of the entire visual frame yet recall it as complete and continuous.

Your Preferred Learning Environment

People tend to seek out places where they feel competent and confident, places where they can make sense of the environment while also being engaged with it.

Research has expanded the notion of preference to include coherence (a sense that things in the environment hang together) and legibility (the inference that one can explore an environment without becoming lost).

Being involved and wanting to explore an environment requires that it have complexity (containing enough variety to make it worth learning about) and mystery (the prospect of gaining more information about an environment).

Preserving, restoring and creating a preferred environment is thought to increase sense of well being and behavioral effectiveness in humans.

Environmental stress and coping

What happens when you wake up late, it's wet and cold outside, you miss breakfast, your dorm is too loud, your classroom or workplace has irregular temperatures, your computer breaks, and your bed is too soft?

Along with the common environmental stressors (e.g., noise, climatic extremes) some define stress as the failure of preference, including in the definition such cognitive stressors as prolonged uncertainty, lack of predictability and stimulus overload.

Research has identified numerous behavioral and cognitive outcomes including physical illness, diminished altruism, helplessness and attentional fatigue.

Coping with stress involves a number of options. Humans can change their physical or social settings to create more supportive environments (e.g., smaller scaled settings, territories) where they can manage the flow of information or stress inducing stimuli. People can also endure the stressful period, incurring mental costs that they deal with later, in restorative settings (e.g., natural areas, privacy, solitude). They can also seek to interpret or make sense of a situation as a way to diffuse its stressful effects, often sharing these interpretations as a part of their culture.

Participation

Make positive choices about when and where you want to work and learn. If you enhance your involvement by choosing or making your environment and circumstance, your inspiration, creativity, learning, and genuine participation will grow.

Conservation behavior

If your environment does not meet your expectations, instigate change. Participation in both the natural and manmade environment bears upon the issue of human growth and development. Explore your environmental attitudes, perceptions and values. What kinds of interventions might you develop in your own practice and promote to improve environmentally appropriate behavior.

Evaluation

You will be able to measure the effectiveness of your learning environment with three characteristics: (1)your ability to acquire and apply basic skills in the solution of the problems presented, (2) usable skills which you will take with you, and (3) your attitude toward the subject as a whole.