1-s2.0-S0883035500000239-main

*Tel.: #44-1223-507111; fax: #44-1223-507120.E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Pointon).

International Journal ofEducational Research 33 (2000) 375}382

Chapter 4

Students' views of environments for learning fromthe primary to the secondary school

Pam Pointon*Homerton College, Cambridge, CB2 2PH, England, UK

Abstract

Research on transfer has alerted us to the anxieties that students experience as they movefrom a smaller school to a bigger school, and how the sudden di!erences in space, size, and theirown position within a large organization can a!ect their identities as learners. Drawing oninterviews with students in their "rst year in secondary school, this chapter examines thedi!erences that students see as important in moving from the primary school to the secondaryschool. Three topics are discussed: freedom of movement, seating, and classroom dis-play. ( 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Research focusing on the classroom environment has tended to address physicaland sensory factors or psycho-social factors. Although there has been some researchinto sensory factors (notably, noise, temperature and light), little work has been doneon color. Seating arrangement has attracted more attention than any other physicalaspect of the classroom environment though this body of research is by no meansextensive. This emphasis may be due to the fact that it is the easiest aspect of theclassroom environment to observe and change.

Fraser (1991) suggested that the strongest tradition in classroom environmentresearch has involved investigations of associations between cognitive and a!ectivelearning outcomes and children's perceptions of the psycho-social characteristics oftheir classrooms. One inference is that student learning outcomes might be improvedby creating classroom environments found empirically to be conducive to learning.Fraser and Fisher (1983) suggested that students wanted a more `positivea classroomenvironment (here relating to preferences for competitive, cohesive, independent, andorganized classrooms) than their present one and that teachers perceived the present

0883-0355/00/$ - see front matter ( 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S 0 8 8 3 - 0 3 5 5 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 2 3 - 9

environment to be more `positivea than did many of their students in the sameclassrooms. There is some evidence that positive perception of the classroom environ-ment is associated with better academic performance (Fraser & Fisher, 1983), al-though Hattie (1986), in contrast, suggested that the evidence of the relationshipbetween preferred classroom environment and learning outcomes is weak. Moststudies have focused on whole class perceptions although there has been some attemptto investigate gender di!erences in preferred classroom environment (see, for example,Owen & Straton, 1980).

Teachers' perceptions of the classroom environment have also received someattention. Cooper (1985) concluded that teachers' working environments may be oflow importance to them. The environment is likely to remain in the background,unnoticed and so be taken for granted. This might be a re#ection of teachers' prioritiesor, for some, a lack of awareness of environmental factors. Certainly, individualteachers express di!erent views on various elements of the classroom environmentand their importance in helping children learn (Pointon & Kershner, 2000). Onesigni"cant "nding of the Pointon and Kershner study was the mismatch betweenteachers' and children's perceptions and the consequent importance of listening tochildren's opinions about the learning environment.

The present small-scale study involved interviewing students at the end of their "rstyear at secondary school about their preferred learning environments and theirperceptions of the main di!erences between classroom environments in primary andsecondary schools. This important post-transfer phase in students' experience hasbeen well researched. Several major studies have focused on students' anxieties(Measor & Woods, 1984; Delamont & Galton, 1986). A few have focused on improve-ments in transfer arrangements (Alston, 1988). Recent small-scale studies have focusedmore on teaching in particular subjects (Stables, 1995) while others have examined thee!ects of transfer on student motivation (Rogers, Galloway, Armstrong, Jackson,& Leo, 1994). Almost two decades ago Galton and Wilcocks (1983) found a markeddecline in achievement, motivation, and enjoyment and suggested that the disparitybetween the child centeredness of primary school and subject centeredness of second-ary school was a key explanatory factor. While some studies have investigatedstudents' accounts of their transfer experiences, little has been published aboutstudents' views of changes in their classroom learning environments as they movefrom the primary to the secondary school.

This study was carried out with thirteen 11 and 12 yr olds in "ve comprehensiveschools in a small town in East Anglia. The interviews took place at the end of thesummer term, 1998, after the students had almost completed their "rst year atsecondary school. The students had previously been part of a larger study involvinga total of 70 9}11 yr olds in primary schools and their three class teachers. The focus ofthe original study was to explore and compare students' and teachers' views of theclassroom environment (see Pointon & Kershner, 2000). This follow-up study withsome of the original Year 6 students focused on students' perceptions of their newenvironments after they had transferred to secondary schools and how they thoughtthe new settings were a!ecting their learning. The students were interviewed individ-ually (as they had been previously) and they were reminded of their views of their

376 P. Pointon / Int. J. Educ. Res. 33 (2000) 375}382

primary classroom environments as well as their earlier feelings about moving tosecondary school.

Most research accounts (see, for example, Rudduck, Chaplain, & Wallace, 1996)focus on students' reactions to the size of the new school which tends, not surprisingly,to have a powerful impact. Such reports also emphasize the anxiety and embarrass-ment as students try to "nd their way around the new school and sometimes arrivelate for lessons. The study reported here raises some issues about the move to the newschool that have not been the focus of earlier research reports.

1. Moving around

In many schools today it is the teachers who òwna the classroom and the studentswho move around the school. This is not merely an important loss of corporateterritory for each class, but guarantees the Paddington Station e!ect; every40 minutes the bell rings and hordes of students pack into narrow corridors(Hargreaves, 1989, p. 182).

One of the main di!erences in students' experience of the physical environment oftheir new schools was studying di!erent subjects in di!erent classrooms and theconsequent movement around school entailed. Previous research into primary}sec-ondary transfer has highlighted the problematic nature of this movement of largenumbers of students and the consequent threat to disciplined behavior. However, thenegative reactions have tended to come more from the teachers; some studentsactually like this sense of movement (Delamont & Galton, 1986). The commonly heldassumption has been that students have freedom of movement in primary schoolswhile being denied it in secondary schools; in fact, this may be so in relation tomovement around the classroom, but in primary schools opportunities to moveround the school were restricted.

The majority of students in the present study indicated that they too liked movingfrom classroom to classroom* for a variety of reasons. For some it was changes inthe social environment which were the prime advantage. As one student said: Ì don'tprefer staying in the same room because you get to know di!erent people in di!erentrooms.a For others, moving to specialist rooms * which they had not experiencedbefore* strengthened their sense of di!erent subjects and the di!erent learning stylesassociated with them.

I think it's better learning in lots of di!erent rooms because in my primary schoolyou would learn about maths and then change to English and you'd forget all aboutthe maths. But when you're in di!erent rooms you remember all the things aboutgeography or science (Student A).

Research into underachievement has highlighted boys' (and also some girls') rest-lessness when they are con"ned for long periods to one space. As a consequence,concentration can #ag, as Gordon and Lahelma (1996) observed.

P. Pointon / Int. J. Educ. Res. 33 (2000) 375}382 377

Boys in secondary schools 2 try to, so it seems, decrease their immobility andincrease their limited space by rocking their chairs, tapping their pencils, shiftingand tapping the #oor. They have restless feet. Girls, however, tend to sit morequietly. Their way of escaping immobility is not so much through use of space, butthrough state of mind. We see more examples of girls sitting with a dreamy look,sometimes their hair pulled forward so that it covers part of their face * theyescape into fantasies (p. 306).

Secondary school students appreciated the opportunities to move around in a lar-ger campus:

Well sometimes you feel more free when you move around. In primary school youhave to stay in the one room all day, but now you get a bit of fresh air when youwant it and it's much better (Student B).

I like it because it gives me a break from sitting down, so I can walk around, andwhen we change classrooms we're allowed to go to the toilet and have a drink(Student C).

Gordon and Lahelma (1996) studied the way children become `professional stu-dentsa. They noted that the "rst day at secondary school included a strong emphasison communicating the school rules, mainly dealing with the control of time, space,movement, and noise. Typically, classrooms are teachers' spaces. `For teachers theirclassroom is more of a private space, for students it is more of a public spacea (p. 307).Their research suggested that students tended to look for their own areas in spacesthat were not part of the ò$ciala school where teaching, learning, and administrationtakes place.

The students in the present study con"rmed their feelings that in secondary schoolthere were no spaces they felt were their own. One boy said he liked going to thelibrary and working on a computer `so you can say that's a kind of own spacea. Herehe highlights the importance, for some, of psychological space rather than physicalspace. For one girl, however, physical space was very important:

When you don't have your own area, it's something that really annoys me. WhenI want to be on my own there's absolutely nowhere. I mean you can go round thePE (physical education) blocks but I'm not supposed to go there. 2 but there's noway you can make sure every child has somewhere they can be on their own. It can'tbe done.

Here the student focuses on personal space and privacy but communal studentspace is also important, as we saw above, and the designation of a `common roomafor older year cohorts is a much -prized privilege.


2. Classrooms as learning environments

For many students light and space are important and here the size of the secondaryclassrooms* often not as full of resources as primary classrooms* appealed to theYear 7 students. They also liked the orderliness of the new classroom environment:

My classroom has got big windows which you can open. There's lots of light. It'sgot blinds so if it's really sunny you can just turn them. There's also lots ofcupboards and the teacher puts our books in a cupboard and locks it so we don'thave to worry about our books getting nicked from our bags (Student D).

The science room is a very nice room. It's not the best subject but because of its bigwindows, a lot of light comes, and the windows are open most of the time. A lot ofair can come in and it's not stu!y and dark. 2 It's nicely spread out as well. There'sjust two big rows of tables (Student E).

Students were also clear about which rooms in secondary schools they did not likeworking in and here again they mentioned size, temperature, color, and tidiness ascontributing to the quality of the working environment.

The art room-well, it's messy. I have to search for ages looking for everything.I don't really get on with my work because I'm looking for a pair of scissors andI can't "nd them (Student F).

The maths room is dense and hot and stu!y and one color. That's why I feel I don'tlike maths. 2 It's not a very nice room. The windows are really small. If they hadmore light or they opened the window, may be put up better displays, may be justpainted it a di!erent color. It's a sort of dark yellow and the tables are just boring aswell. Everywhere else they're nice wooden tables, but (here) they're plastic. Alsobecause it's hot you're concentrating on trying to get cooler rather than getting thework done (Student G).

If you're in a completely grey room it's not going to help you learn because youthink `This is so boring, I don't feel happy.a It makes you feel sad, that kind ofthing. But if you're in a room with loads of color, it spruces you up a bit (Student H).

It is interesting that most students were able to distinguish between their feelingsabout the subject or the teacher from their feelings about the classrooms* althoughnegative feelings about a room can transfer to the subject itself.

3. Displays

For one boy, a key di!erence between primary and secondary school is that ofownership of the classroom environment. In primary school `you draw a picture and


you display ita. But in the secondary school `the classroom arrangement is up to theteacher''. He felt the primary classroom was more `hisa.

Other comments about `displaya related less to issues of ownership and more to thepurpose of display and how it relates to learning. The data suggest, again, theimportance of seeing things from the students' perspective. One boy highlighted aninteresting issue where there were similarities between primary and secondary schools:displays of students' work, he said, àre put up after you've done something and so itdoesn't really helpa. Here he is aware of the lost opportunity of using displays tosupport work in progress. Another student found that displays were less helpful in hersecondary school:

Usually there are only posters anyway, and because you have to do the work onyour own there's no help, you can't get it from looking at the displays. If there areany displays it's of a di!erent year's work and that doesn't help (Student I).

It might be expected that all primary-age children appreciate displays. However,the earlier study with Year 6 children highlighted individual di!erences in thisregard, with some children "nding displays distracting. Most secondary schoolsdo not place as much emphasis on displays as do most primary schools, althoughthere are di!erences from school to school and teacher to teacher. Further re-search is needed on how displays can more e!ectively help students learn; educatorsmight also think about explaining the rationale for displays and how they di!er fromprimary to secondary school and, within the secondary school, from one subject toanother.

4. Seating

In the primary school students usually spend a lot of time at a table with two orthree other students. The secondary school o!ers the possibility not only of experienc-ing a range of di!erent seating patterns during the school day, but also of indepen-dence. The chance to sit alone is, for some, not just a novelty, but an aid to greaterconcentration.

When you talk with your friends they sometimes distract you. If you're on your own,you know you've got to do something and so you do your work. You can't bebothered when you're with friends, but you can be bothered when you're not(Student J).

Working in a group was still favored by some students, particularly for sometasks. Groups allowed students to share ideas and be less dependent on the teacher.Once again, the issue of autonomy and independence emerges as a strong concern inthe "rst year of secondary school. Furthermore, whereas in the primary schoolstudents might sit together without necessarily working together, in secondary schoolthey were learning, in some subjects, how to work e!ectively together. They could


distinguish between friends who were good to work with and friends who were not(see the chapter by Demetriou et al. in this volume).

The issue of ownership also emerged in relation to seating. The Year 6 students hadliked having their own table and chair in the primary school. As a primary teacherexplained:

I had one child who put drawing pins into his chair so he knew that was his chair.He couldn't see the drawing pins, but if he didn't have that chair he got intoa terrible state and went round looking at all the chairs until he got his one back.It's like when they put their labels on their drawers, that makes it theirs.

For the primary child personalizing the classroom is easier to achieve, but how dosecondary students, who may change classrooms every 40 minutes, attain the òwner-ship and defense of geographical areasa (Altman, 1975, p. 5). Secondary studentstypically do not have their own spaces; their desk during a lesson is only `borroweda,as it were.

5. Discussion

It would be di$cult for teachers to meet every individual student's preference withregard to the sensory and physical environment. What is achievable, however, is forteachers to make clear the ground rules of the classroom and the occasions wherestudents can have choices. Teachers may also want to think how to enable students tore#ect on what aspects of the classroom setting help and hinder their learning. This isimportant because there seem to be di!erences between a teacher's judgment ofa good classroom in which to teach and a student's view of what is a good classroomin which to learn. As Woods (1990) pointed out, `the parties to negotiation havedi!erent interestsa. One way of hearing the students' voice is through open discussionsabout the classrooms in which they prefer to learn. One secondary school recentlyconducted a large-scale survey of students' preferences with regard to classroomenvironments and the data in#uenced the schools' spending plans. Including studentsin the decisions made about how scarce "nancial resources are to be prioritized maywell be important in making students feel greater ownership of classroom spaces. Inthis regard, Reynolds (1992) found that in the most e!ective schools students weregiven a sense of responsibility and control over their environment and were able todevelop shared goals with their teachers. This concurs with theories about thepsychological signi"cance of perceiving one's environment as controllable.

What small-scale, interview-based research of the kind reported in this chapter cando is to sensitize teachers and researchers to a range of in#uences and unintendede!ects which may often pass unnoticed as teachers strive to cope with the normalburdens of their daily work. The following two questions are among the mostinteresting questions to emerge from this study.

f How far are students' comments about physical features of the classroomenvironment a coded means of discussing matters they may "nd less easy to talk


about * such as their dislike or fear of certain subjects or teachers and theiranxieties about the social climate in situations that are new to them?

f To what extent is it possible for teachers to give students, through the classroomand school environment, a greater sense of control and ownership of the spaces inwhich they work and learn?

The evidence from this small-scale study suggests that further investigation of theissue could provide important payo!s for schools in terms of students' improvedattitude to school and commitment to learning.

References

Alston, C. (1988). Secondary transfer project, Bulletin 2. ILEA.Altman, I. (1975). The environment and social behavior. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.Cooper, I. (1985). Teachers' assessments of primary school buildings: The role of the physical environment

in education. British Educational Research Journal, 11(3), 253}269.Delamont, S., & Galton, M. (1986). Inside the secondary classroom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Fraser, B.J. (1991). Two decades of classroom environment research. In B. J. Fraser, & H. J. Walberg (Eds.),

Educational environments: Evaluation, antecedents and consequences. New York: Pergamon Press.Fraser, B. J., & Fisher, D. L. (1983). Use of actual and preferred classroom environmental scales in

person}environment "t research. Journal of Educational Psychology, 30, 19}27.Galton, M., & Wilcocks, J. (1983). Moving from the primary classroom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Gordon, T., & Lahelma, E. (1996). School is like an ant's nest: Spatiality and embodiment in schools. Gender

and Education, 8, 303}310.Hargreaves, D. (1989). The challenge for the comprehensive school. London: Routledge Kegan and Paul.Hattie, J. (1986). Preferred classroom environment and approach to learning. British Journal of Educational

Psychology, 58, 345}349.Measor, L., & Woods, P. (1984). Changing schools. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Owen, L., & Straton, R. G. (1980). The development of a cooperative, competitive and individualised

learning preference scale for students. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 50, 147}161.Pointon, P., & Kershner, R. (2000). Making decisions about organising the primary classroom environment

as a context for learning: The views of three experienced teachers and their students. Teaching andTeacher Education, 16, 117}127.

Reynolds, D. (1992). School e!ectiveness and school improvements: an updated review of the Britishliterature. In D. Reynolds, & P. Cuttance (Eds.), School ewectiveness: Research, policy and practice.London: Cassell.

Rogers, C., Galloway, D., Armstrong, D., Jackson, C., & Leo, E. (1994). Changes in motivational style overthe transfer from primary to secondary school: Subject and dispositional e!ects. Education and ChildPsychology, 11(2), 26}38.

Rudduck, J., Chaplain, R., & Wallace, G. (1996). School improvement: What can pupils tell us?. London:David Fulton.

Stables, K. (1995). Discontinuity in transition: Students' experiences of science and technology in Year 6 andYear 7. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 5(2), 157}169.

Woods, P. (1990). The happiest days: How students cope with school. London: Falmer Press.

Pam Pointon is senior lecturer in primary education at Homerton College, Cam-bridge. Her research interests include global education, teaching and learning stylesand the classroom environment.


Documents

1-s2.0-S0883035500000239-main