Effects of pedagogical transition on classroom design for higher education

Abstract

Active learning has played an important role in recent years as it carries a highly positive effect of improving students' learning attitude and successiveness. This is particularly important to the construction industry to nurture future assets of the field. Indeed, classroom design is a determinative factor in the performance of learning and teaching. Continuous assessment of learning performance is crucial that could indicate the direction of future classroom renovation to provide an advanced learning and teaching environment for students and teachers. Hence, this paper aims to provide a better understanding of the latest trend in learning mode preference. The characteristics and reasons for choosing active and traditional learning were examined from the students' perspectives using questionnaire survey with a total of 156 students comprising 84 full-time and 72 part-time students respectively in the module of building engineering and management. Moreover, this paper focus on the effects of pedagogical transition on design factors and design criteria for a flexible classroom. The analysis of the responses collected from the students' perspectives shows interesting findings useful for adopting the active learning approach and for classroom design. Most of the factors were rated very important by the students, which shows the various factors that should be considered by teachers and administrators in the delivery of teaching instructions and the classroom design, respectively. A different mix of traditional and active learning approaches might be suitable, depending on the subject's intended learning outcomes. A traditional approach will facilitate learning more orderly learning, although most of the instructions are from the teacher, while active learning is more collaborative and engaging for the students. Practical implications of the study were also discussed with recommendations for future work to overcome the limitation of the current study which analyzed student data from the building engineering and management module in Hong Kong.