s newest experimental classroom, the "Collaboration Café," was designed to facilitate active and collaborative learning while also exploring a new classroom design that shares café-style characteristics. The room includes limestone accents, plentiful natural light, and brightly colored seating (Lei 2010). There are high and low bistro-style tables at the center, booths, and soft sofa seating clustered around small coffee tables (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The technology in the room includes multiple projection possibilities and collaborative tables that support the sharing of laptop images on video monitors, as well as access to six or more PCs and a networked printer, all to facilitate student engagement with course materials and each other. Unlike other active learning classrooms, the design of the Collaboration Café does not assume any particular pedagogical approach; rather, the space is intended to provide a flexible, technology-rich, collaborative space for faculty to use in whatever ways best enable them to achieve their instructional goals.
Why We Conducted the StudyThe overarching goal of this study was to understand how instructors were using this experimental classroom and whether this new style of classroom provides an environment that facilitates active and collaborative learning.
MethodThe following sections provide details regarding the subjects of this study, the research instruments used, and our data collection methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.