Abstract
In this article, the actual impact on students' instructional and epistemological beliefs of systematic attempts to implement a problem‐based, collaborative and technologically‐rich learning environment in regular, internationally‐spread, secondary school classrooms is described. Although the literature suggests that learning environments do affect both categories of beliefs, empirical evidence is currently limited. To study the effects of learning environments, classroom‐based learning environments were redesigned in various respects. The change entailed the implementation of a problem‐based, collaborative and technologically‐rich environment to replace the more regular content‐driven, teacher‐centred and textbook‐based environment. The implementation of the innovation was hypothesised to result in a change of both the instructional and epistemological beliefs of students. Moreover, these beliefs were expected to evolve in the direction of the assumptions underlying the innovative environment. A classical pretest and posttest study resulted in the confirmation of the first hypothesis. However, for the second hypothesis, the opposite was found: students' beliefs strengthened in a direction that contradicts the basic principles underlying the designed environment. The study highlights that a poor implementation of potentially powerful learning environments can result in unexpected and even undesirable side effects.
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Elen, J., Clarebout, G. An invasion in the classroom: influence of an ill-structured innovation on instructional and epistemological beliefs. Learning Environments Research 4, 87–105 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011450524504
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011450524504