What Factors become Priorities in the Decision-making Process that Influence Administrators of Campus Space to Choose one Type of General-use Classroom over Another?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current best practice education and design research indicated that flexible general-use teaching spaces, not inflexible row-and-column classrooms, improved student success. Research indicated inflexible classrooms inhibited progressive models of pedagogy by discouraging active learner-centered methods. The focus of this study was the inflexible general-use classroom that was the standard method of teacher-centered education. In this qualitative exploratory, descriptive case study I interviewed administrators in three Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology who were in various ways responsible for the `delivery of classrooms'. I extracted factors that influenced the decisions of participants to prioritize the inflexible classroom model and looked for reasons why the transition to supportive flexible space had been slow to emerge. Factors that stalled space changes included issues of space utilization, faculty preference, technology fatigue and effort. I also explored the colleges' historic use of inflexible classrooms, the characteristics that have maintained their use and barriers that have prevented change as well as the historic and current environmental context in which decisions about classrooms are made. The results show that administrators, for the most part reflect their learner-centered Strategic Plans. However, I discovered a gap in their understanding that inflexible teacher-centered classrooms support one pedagogy model where learner-centered pedagogies are supported by physical spaces that promote flexibility and movement. To ensure inflexible classrooms remained, administrators repeated factors containing misinformation that supported the single priority; to make the most of funding through maximization of space and schedule. Slow transition through insufficient momentum was possible because administrators did not have the design experience or skills to know better. They formed alliances and used factors to argue for the continuance of the row-and-column general-use classroom. This continuance was most evident in two of the three subject colleges. One college in the study was contemplating change while the other two were not. Emergent results showed that although best practices in design and education provided evidence that change from inflexible to flexible general-use classrooms could improve student success, environments continued to adhere to the historic standard row-and-column configuration. I hope to create the momentum for change from inflexible to flexible environments required leadership.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".