The Experience of Laboratory Learning – How Do Chemistry Students Perceive Their Learning Environment?

1. IntroductionLearning environments and learning organisations have in the recent years been faced with radical changes as new generations of students enter the old institutions. Both the physical facilities and the practices that the organizations entertain may be challenged (Faulkner & McLaughlin, 2012; Harrison & Hutton, 2014). Many of the newcomers belong to the socalled digital natives (Prensky, 2012) who use various digital applications and mobile devices as integrated parts in their everyday lives in different knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing activities. However, not much is known about the relationship between students' beliefs about knowledge - their epistemologies - and their perceptions of different learning environments.Learning always takes place in a context: it is not only a process of acquiring more knowledge, but rather, increasingly active participation in a culture (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lonka, 2012). In higher education, as well, the ways students learn are embedded in the different dimension of the learning environment. This context is not only situational, but it relies on culturally and historically developed structures (Vygotsky, 1978). The cognitive development of human beings depends of on a certain kind of cultural environment for its realization (Tomasello, 1999).Bruner (1996) pointed out the power of culture in shaping human mind. Also the environments where learning takes place shape our intellectual efforts. Our activities are mediated by varying tools and artifacts (Hakkarainen, 2009). The physically distributed cognition and intelligence is supported and emergent along with technological innovations (Hakkarainen et al., 2013). Today, also technologies and social media mediate our forms of collaboration and learning even though we may not at all times be aware of it. Even when we are not using such aids ourselves, they inevitably change the ways of communication in the society. For example, many societal movements and revolutions have spread and been reinforced by Twitter, and innovations - areally and intellectually - are spread and mediated by these technological prostheses that we use in the ordering of things and in communication (see also Hakkarainen et ah, 2004).Learning environments consist of the practices of teaching, learning, and assessment (Biggs, 1996) as well as the physical learning environment. Biggs (1996) used the concept constructive alignment to describe an ideal educational enterprise in which students adopt approaches to learning allowing for a profound understanding of the learning material, and in which all aspects of the teaching, including the assessment systems, are aligned to, and support these approaches.Relationships between teaching and learning are not always simple. Rather, they are mediated by students' goals and strategies as well as situational factors. Lindblom-Ylanne & Lonka (1999) investigated this dynamic interplay between learners and the learning environment in a traditional educational setting by using Vermunt & Verloop's (1999) idea of frictions between learners and learning environment. A friction may be either constructive or destructive, the former promoting students' intellectual development, and the latter hindering it. Lindblom-Ylanne and Lonka (1999; 2001) found indications of destructive frictions when medical students, in their attempts to make sense of the learning environment and its requirements, were prone to adopting superficial learning strategies that were below their knowledge capacity. Their study showed that the best students of that time did not entertain very collaborative ideas of learning. Only later, Lonka et al. (2008) introduced the concept collaborative construction of knowledge, a perspective that had become a more common epistemological view among medical students. This standpoint was later confirmed in various domains, e.g. engineering (Heiskanen & Lonka, 2012). …