What we know: Positive learning environments: Better learning is likely to happen in collaborative and highly interactive environments

The ‘What we know’ theories are going to be published here as a series of blog posts over the coming weeks but are also available now collected as a free eBook from the OCSLD shop, where there are now four titles available. Our new book, Assessment Literacy: The Foundation for Improving Student Learning is available in paperback and kindle formats. 

Beyond the immediate level of the course experience, there is evidence that there are aspects of the wider, more general environment that can also be made more conducive to improving student learning.

Better learning is likely to happen in collaborative and highly interactive environments 

What do we know?

Departmental cultures that create rich and engaging learning environments, that are collaborative and highly-interactive, where teaching is valued, and that engage in a processes to improve teaching are likely to produce better-performing students, even when compared with other departments in the same institution.

This aligns closely with Wenger’s conception of a ‘community of practice’ arguably going a long way to meeting his three key requirements of “a joint enterprise’, ‘mutual engagement’ and ‘ a social entity’, and with the notion of ‘cognitive apprenticeship’.  The latter takes a constructivist approach to learning where the context of the learning is all important – in this case that context being within a community of academic practice.

It is also possible to link with the previous two perspectives, a theory which started in nursing education. It sees the student as being on a learning journey from ‘novice’ to ‘expert’ moving, from the outside edge, ever further into the community of practice.  The more successful department (and programme) will do all that it can to progress the student along that journey, and to bring them into the community.

Implications for improving student learning

To create an active, vibrant and welcoming sense of community, with numerous opportunities for both formal and informal interaction, and with the explicit notion of bringing the students into the community of academic practice.

Further reading

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Benner, P. (1984) From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall