Abstract

Why are classrooms shaped the way that they typically are? If we are going to renovate a classroom, how can we reshape it to improve learning and teaching? How do new technologies impact learning and teaching when combined with conventional educational technologies. These are the questions that motivated a sequence of studies of the role that artifacts play in higher education learning, ranging from advanced computing and communication technologies to the more mundane objects like blackboards, chairs and tables. Artifacts are objects that are made by people. In higher education, much of the learning and teaching takes place in classrooms, laboratories, libraries, or other spaces especially designed for learning. Yet there has been little systematic study of the roles that these places play in supporting learning and teaching. Classrooms are filled with artifacts -- human-made objects -- that play a role in the interactions in those spaces. This paper will describe a set of studies looking at a wide range of university classrooms, including diary studies, observations, focus group studies, interviews, and analysis of video tapes of the use of those classrooms. The analyses described in this paper will identify the roles that classroom artifacts play in the focus of attention. Artifacts can be classified as "attractors" or "distracters" of attention. Different patterns of use of classrooms can be characterized by either a single fixed focus of attention, a dynamically changing single focus of attention, or multiple foci of attention. The analyses also determine when the different artifacts act in concert in influencing the focus of attention and when they operate in conflict with each other. The studies of classroom artifacts can help in deciding how to use existing classrooms and in designing and modifying classrooms.

Back to the grove of academe: The idyllic wireless wall-less classroom?

Plato taught in the groves of Academe, a garden outside of Athens. Since then, we have the image of an ideal educational setting being a group of learners and teachers sitting in the sunshine under some trees, discussing deep thoughts and actively learning together. You may have daydreamed about this idyllic image, when sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a bleak overheated classroom during a boring lecture.

Our College of Education recently acquired several rolling carts of wireless laptop computers which can be checked out for class use. Two of the authors of this paper (JAL & CCC) were co-teaching an advanced seminar, and we reserved one of these carts to hold one of the seminar sessions outdoors late in the semester during Spring 2002. Here is a picture from that session, held in a courtyard outside the Education Building.

While the session went well, we discovered during the session at least 8 reasons why classrooms were invented.

1) The weather forecast contained a reasonable chance of rain, which would have forced us to move indoors. Instructors usually do not have to check the weather report before going to a class session.

2) The concrete benches were hard and there were no backs, cutting down on the comfort of seating.

3) The concrete benches were immovable, and so could not be rearranged to fit the needs of the seminar.

4) There were no desk or table surfaces to put the laptops on, which threatened to slide off laps during the session.

5) When the sun came out from behind clouds, students had trouble reading the laptop displays.

6) The session was in a courtyard next to the entrance of the Education Building, and people entering or leaving the Building felt free to greet the seminar members or to initiate conversations.

7) There was no shared display artifact (no blackboard or whiteboard), and the software on the laptops did not make a virtual shared display possible, so people put things up on their laptop displays and then turned them to show others.

8) On the day of the seminar, the university had scheduled the once-a-year trimming of the plants in the courtyard (note the clippings on the ground in the picture above), and the grounds people used loud gas-powered blowers to gather up the clippings. It soon became very hard to hear any of the other members of the class.

By the end of this seminar session, we wondered if Plato had to put up with gardeners and tree trimmers when his School met in the groves of Academe.

Artifacts for learning

One advantage of holding this class session outdoors was that it highlighted aspects of the artifacts of conventional classrooms that are so familiar that they have become invisible. These include new technological artifacts such as laptop computers, wireless networks, and computer projectors, but it also include more familiar artifacts like chairs, tables, blackboards, whiteboards, lighting, heating, walls and ceilings. We will call these things "artifacts for learning", made objects that are designed to support learning and teaching. "Artifacts for learning" are a subset of the more general concept of "cognitive artifacts" (Norman, 1991) . By "artifacts for learning", we mean the human-made objects that are found in learning environments. The term "learning artifacts" is sometimes used to refer to the objects that learners made during the process of learning, that can then be put into portfolios as evidence of learning. The "learning artifacts" are generally not "artifacts for learning" unless they are reintroduced into the learning environment as objects to support learning.

Room 162: A classroom that turned its back on technology and then returned

During the summer of 2002, the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign renovated the majority of its classrooms. While the planning process for this renovation was quite extensive, involving architects, media specialists, technology experts, and College administrators, two of the authors of this paper (JAL & CCC) were brought in about half way through the process when they asked what research there was on higher education classrooms and their impact on learning. We found very little empirical research to address this question. While there was a considerable body of research on pre-college classrooms and how their layout and use impacted education (Weinstein & David, 1987) , there were very few empirically-based studies of higher education classrooms (Wollin & Montagne, 1981; Wong, Sommer, & Cook, 1992) . There were many reports of higher education classroom renovations, some of which contained anecdotal reports of the impact of those renovations on one or two faculty (Kowalski, 2002) . There were many design guidelines for higher education classrooms (Clabaugh, 1993; Knirk, 1979) , but almost no systematic empirical studies.

We conducted during the spring of 2002 two focus group studies and several interviews with faculty. And we collected video tape of 8 classes in 5 different classrooms. In one of these video taped sessions, we noted the disruption caused by late arrivals to the class, because the door to this classroom (Room 162) was in the "front" of the room.

The renovation of this classroom not only introduced new technologies and improved the existing artifacts for learning in the room, but it also redefined the "front" of the room to be at the opposite end of the room. A computer projector and two speakers were ceiling-mounted, with the projector pointing south. A drop down projection screen was installed along the south wall. A console was constructed in the southeast corner containing a resident computer, a video tape player, and network and projection connections.

These changes were implemented over the summer, and right before classes began in the fall semester, one of the authors (JAL) visited each of the renovated classrooms to see how the planned renovations worked out in practice. He was surprised when he raised the new pull-down screen at the south end to see bare wall. A white board was planned for that wall, but somehow never got installed. So the room had two "fronts"! If the computer projector was used, the south end was front; the blackboard was used, the north end was front. We immediately ordered a display board to be installed at the south end of the room, but this did not get installed for several months.

At the beginning of the semester, all the chairs in this room were facing south, toward the "new" front. That did not last long, as shown in this picture:

We call this "the classroom that turned its back on technology", since all the student chairs have their backs to the new console and the ceiling-mounted projector. However, by November a blackboard was finally installed at the south end, and so as you can see in this next picture, the classroom then "re-turned" to the new technology - all the student chairs are now facing the console and the new projection screen and blackboard.

Since that time, the arrangement of chairs in this room seems to vary day-by-day, with the orientation sometimes primarily toward the south, sometimes toward the north, and sometimes ignoring either "front", as shown in this picture.

One of the lessons learned from this observational study is that classrooms are used in a wide variety of ways by different instructors, so that flexibility is a substantial advantage in designing or renovating classrooms. We'll see some of this diversity below, where we describe our case studies of classroom use in higher education.

Our case studies

We videotaped eight class sessions of six different classes which met in five different classrooms during the 2001-2002 academic year. These were all classes in College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Two classes were undergraduate courses, two were graduate classes, and one contained both undergraduate and graduate students. One of the graduate courses was relatively small (6 students); one of the undergraduate courses was a large lecture course; the other courses were intermediate in size. One of the courses met in a relatively small seminar room; one met in a large lecture hall; one met in a computer laboratory; and the rest met in medium sized rooms with individual chairs with attached desk surfaces (like those shown in the pictures above). Four of the class sessions met in Room 162, the room pictured above, but before it was renovated.

Analysis of the case studies

In preliminary viewing of the video tapes, there were two important ways in which the artifacts for learning seemed to impact teaching and learning. The first of these is the ways that the artifacts influence the attention of the students and teacher. We developed a set of analytical techniques for tracking the flow of attention over the course of a class session that will be described in this paper. The second important way is the process by which artifacts present multiple coordinated presentations of the course material which influence the acquisition of the multiple coordinated representations that characterize expertise in a domain. The analysis and techniques for that are described in Ching, Levin, & Parisi (2003), which is another paper in this structured poster session.

Foci of attention

There is a long history of research on the role that attention plays in learning (Kinchla, 1992; Norman, 1969; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977) . When viewing the video tapes of our eight case studies, we were struck by the ways that different artifacts for learning influenced the foci of attention during a class session. We developed a coding sheet for tracking these changes in the foci of attention (shown in Appendix 1), and coded the case studies for the flow of attention. While these coding sheets were useful as a mechanism for tracking the flow of attention, they do not make the differences in the flows easily accessible.

Attention maps

To make the flows (and differences in flows) easier to see, we developed a mechanism for visualizing these flows, in what we call attention maps. Below is an attention map for the first part of a class session in Room 162 (the same room diagrammed and photographed above).

In this attention map, we can see that the focus started with a student calling the class to attention (3:30), then some remarks by the instructor near the front of the room (3:30-3:32). Then the class divided up into six groups, with six different foci of attention (3:33). One student asked a question of the instructor, which attracted the attention of all the class members (3:33), which was answered by the instructor (3:34).

Attractors and distracters

From our analyses of the flow of attention foci in the eight video case studies, we have been able to classify two kinds of attention shifts: attractors and distracters. These differ only in the intention of the instructor of the course. Attractors are those uses of artifacts for learning that influence a change in attention focus that are desired by the instructor. Distracters are those uses of artifacts for learning that cause changes which are not intended by the instructor. One lesson to be learned from our focus of attention analyses is that instructors should strive to use attractors of attention and avoid distracters of attention. Sometime these distracters are generated by the instructor him/herself - nervous pacing in front of the class, gestures that do not contribute to the intended focus, the use of animation in presentation software that does not contribute, etc.

But beyond this simple classification, we have been developing a broader framework for thinking about the role of attention foci in classrooms. We describe an initial outline of this framework below.

Multiple coordinated foci and sequences of foci

Studies of the differences between experts and novices have highlighted the role that multiple coordinated representations serve for experts. An expert is someone who has multiple representations of the domain of expertise and who has the meta-knowledge of when to use which representation and how to switch from one representation to another. In characterizing expert teaching, we are impressed with the ways that expert teachers use multiple coordinated foci of attention to help learners to acquire multiple coordinated representations. An expert teacher uses a wide range of artifacts for learning to attract the attention of learners in a coordinated way, both with multiple coordinated foci of attention at times and with a skillful use of sequences of foci of attention over the duration of a class. We plan to continue our studies of the ways that artifacts for learning are used by teachers to create powerful and coordinated flows of attention foci.

Summary

With a set of studies of higher education classrooms and their uses, we have tried to uncover some of the mechanism by which artifacts for learning influence learning and teaching. In this paper, we explore ways in which these artifacts impact focus of attention and the flow of foci that occur during a class session. We present here a description of a framework we are developing to relate the impact of artifacts on attention and upon the broader issue of how to support effectively the learning of expertise through multiple coordinated foci of attention.

References

Ching, C. C., Levin, J. A., & Parisi, J. (2003). Artifacts of knowledge and practice in university teaching and learning. Paper to be presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association, April 22, 2003.

Clabaugh, S. (1993). Design of general purpose classrooms, lecture halls and seminar rooms (2nd ed.). College Park, MD: Educational Technology Center, University of Maryland.

Kinchla, R. A. (1992). Attention. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 771-742.

Knirk, F. G. (1979). Designing productive learning environments. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Kowalski, T. J. (2002). Planning and managing school facilities (2nd ed.). Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Norman, D. A. (1969). Memory and attention. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Norman, D. A. (1991). Cognitive artifacts. In J. M. Carroll (Ed.), Designing interaction: Psychology at the human-computer interface (pp. 17-37). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84, 1-66.

Weinstein, C. S., & David, T. G. (Eds.). (1987). Spaces for children: The built environment and child development. New York NY: Plenum Press.

Wollin, D. D., & Montagne, M. (1981). College classroom environment: Effects of sterility versus amiability on student and teacher performance. Environment and Behavior, 13, 707-716.

Wong, C. Y., Sommer, R., & Cook, R. (1992). The soft classroom 17 years later. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 12, 337-343.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the faculty in the College of Education who participated in our focus groups and interview sessions and especially those who agreed to allow us to video tape and analyze their classes. The kind of research described here is rare in part because the cooperation that we received from our fellow faculty members is relatively rare.

Appendix 1

Focus of Attention rating sheet

Note whenever there is a change (i.e. if there is no change, don't note down anything). Note the time, the new focus, and the attention focus mechanisms.

Types of attention: (default is single, note if different)

Single focus - note who the focus is on and how what caused the change

Multiple focus - note who the foci are and what caused the change

Alternation focus - note the pattern of alternation

Instructor: Cynthia Carter Ching

Class: EdPsy 311

Room: 162 Education Bldg.

Date: 4/17/02

Rater: Jeanine Parisi

Date of rating: 10/11/02

***Actual time began at 4:04

Time	Attention focus change	Attention focus mechanisms
3:30	Student	Student whistles to get attention of class; Class begins
3:30	Instructor	Calls attention to assignment sheet. Changes date for assignment (typo).
3:32	Instructor	Asks if there are any questions, None at this time
3:33	students/instructor/handouts	Students begin talking in groups, Instructor talking to one group, Groups referring to handouts
3:33	Student	Student asks a question; noise stops; groups listen to answer (someone said it was important)
3:34	Instructor	Answers student's question
3:35	Instructor	Explains assignment
3:35	Multiple: Student/Instructor	Student asks question; instructor responds, student clarifies explanation, instructor responds
3:36	Instructor	Makes general announcements before begin with activity
3:36	Instructor	Asks question, "who would mind if presentations are taped?"
3:37	Student	Asks "who is going to view tapes?"
3:38	Multiple: Instructor & Projector	Turns overhead on; Instructor lecturing; students taking notes
3:41	Instructor	Refers to what students should pay attention to in wireless activity
3:41		Baby cries
3:42	Instructor	Passes out handout
3:42	Instructor/Student	Student asks question, Instructor answers, student wants more explanation, Instructor says "I'll talk to you later"
3:42	Handout/Instructor	Instructor refers to handout, Instructor asks, "Is there anyone who didn't get it?"
3:48	Student	Walks in late, squeaks chair, class distracted
3:48	Instructor	Refers to next page on handout, Students flip to page
3:48	Student	Walks in late, squeaks chair, class does not seem too distracted this time
3:49	Students	Start discussing activity in groups; gets noisy
3:49	Laptops	Instructor begins passing out wireless laptops to groups
3:52	Students/Laptops/Handouts	Students in groups looking at websites and discussing them; referring to handouts and taking notes
4:12	Music (laptop)	First sign of audio from laptop, class quiets momentarily, most groups focused on screen
4:13	Electronic Voice	First sign of "electronic voice" from laptop
4:19	Instructor	Asks "How many groups are on second website?" students raise hands, continue with group activity
4:24	Instructor	Says, "If haven't looked at 3^rd website-go ahead and look at one", groups continue with activity
4:30	Instructor	Starts talking-discusses websites, most groups close laptop
4:31	Instructor & Students	Asks questions about websites, student answers, instructor gives feedback, instructor asks anything else, Q&A session continues
4:34	Instructor/Student/Handout	Instructor refers to #3 student answers, instructor gives feedback, instructor asks anything else, Q&A session continues; students also referring to handouts
4:37	END DATA

Why Classrooms? Case Studies of the Artifacts for Learning in Higher Education