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Construction is booming on college campuses. Annual spending by colleges has tripled in the last decade. In 2006 alone, over $15 billion in new construction opened on U.S. campuses, the most in any single year in history. The trend is expected to continue as colleges compete to attract students and faculty, while also looking to meet demands for improved technology, facilities, and educational results.

Yet if you take a look around many college campuses today, you’ll notice that the typical classroom remains a throwback to the past: desks lined up in precise order, a podium set in front, and a writing board bolted to the wall. Remove the occasional projector and the computer hook-up, and the classroom of 2007 looks pretty much the same as the 1957 model.

Once class starts, students realize soon enough what's wrong with an Eisenhower-era classroom. As one student put it, "our professors tell us to think outside the box, then they put us in a box to do it."

The problem is that the college classroom is now being asked to do more than ever. Students are spending 72% of their time in classrooms involved in discussion, and 23.4% of their time engaged in group projects. Rarely are classrooms used solely as lecture halls.

Classrooms are overdue for change but there's been little attention focused on their design: What new tools and technology are needed in the classroom?  What do instructors and students need to meet increased expectations? How does the classroom work with other spaces on campus?

Steelcase developed a number of hypotheses about what a high performance classroom should be, and built a prototype classroom to test the hypotheses. The results of the study suggest that new design principles developed and tested in the new LearnLab^™ Environment can not only help move the college classroom into the 21^st century, but also work in practically any college classroom, new construction or renovation.