Thirty Years of Learning Environments: Looking Back and Looking Forward

This volume is a commemorative book celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Learning Environments of the American Educational Researchers’ Association. It includes a historical perspective starting with the formation of the SIG in 1984 and the first program space at the AERA annual meeting in 1985 in Chicago. This retrospective notes other landmarks in the development of the SIG such as the creation of the international journal Learning Environments Research.

The study of learning environments was first conceptualized around the need to develop perceptual and psychosocial measures for describing students’ individual or shared educational experiences (e.g. ’feel of the class’ or ’classroom climate’). Over the ensuing decades, the field expanded considerably from its early roots in science education to describe other phenomenon such as teacher-student interpersonal relationships, or applications in pre-service teacher education and action research.

The book also describes several new areas of promise for the expanding field of learning environments research that in the future will include more diverse contexts and applications. These will include new contexts but established research programs in areas such as information and communications technology and environmental education, but also in emerging research contexts such as the physical classroom environment and links among learning environment contexts and students’ emotional health and well-being.

Contributors are: Perry den Brok, Rosie Dhaliwhal, Barry J. Fraser, Catherine Martin-Dunlop, David Henderson, Melissa Loh, Tim Mainhardt, George Sirrakos, Alisa Stanton, Theo Wubbels, and David B. Zandvliet.

David B. Zandvliet, Ph.D. (1999), is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. An experienced researcher, he has published and presented widely on the topic of learning environments. His interests lie in the areas of science, and environmental education.

Barry J. Fraser, Ph.D. (1976), is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Widely considered a seminal thinker around research on students’ psychosocial environment perceptions, his main research interests include science education, learning environments and educational evaluation.