Effects of Infrastructure on Collaboration in Classrooms
Faculty Mentor Name
Hadi Ali, Ashley Rea, Jonathan Adams
Format Preference
Poster
Abstract
The Innovative Spaces project will focus on finding the factors of a classroom that generate collaboration and communication. We intend to identify these factors by creating a questionnaire that will be modeled after existing collaboration scales for businesses and medical professionals. The questions will gather quantitative data about the number of times an object is used and qualitative data about how effective the item was at helping students and professors communicate ideas. This questionnaire will be completed by students and professors that have classes in traditional classrooms and classrooms that are modified to better suit student communication during group projects. This will allow differences between modified and traditional rooms to be analyzed to determine the benefit of changing a room’s composition. The project will also take a measure of how malleable sections of the classroom environment are (chairs are easily movable; however, computers are not) and how that affects the abilities of students to collaborate as well. The projected outcome of the project is that the features that generate collaboration and communication will be identified, and that the malleability of those factors can be used to project how quickly they could be implemented into more rooms on campus.
Effects of Infrastructure on Collaboration in Classrooms
The Innovative Spaces project will focus on finding the factors of a classroom that generate collaboration and communication. We intend to identify these factors by creating a questionnaire that will be modeled after existing collaboration scales for businesses and medical professionals. The questions will gather quantitative data about the number of times an object is used and qualitative data about how effective the item was at helping students and professors communicate ideas. This questionnaire will be completed by students and professors that have classes in traditional classrooms and classrooms that are modified to better suit student communication during group projects. This will allow differences between modified and traditional rooms to be analyzed to determine the benefit of changing a room’s composition. The project will also take a measure of how malleable sections of the classroom environment are (chairs are easily movable; however, computers are not) and how that affects the abilities of students to collaborate as well. The projected outcome of the project is that the features that generate collaboration and communication will be identified, and that the malleability of those factors can be used to project how quickly they could be implemented into more rooms on campus.