Sociotopes of learning: Differences in domestic learning ecologies between high- and low-achieving elementary school students

The present study examines how elementary school students’ home learning workspaces relate to academic performance. We investigate these workspaces using the sociotope approach, which views environments as action spaces that differ in objective affordances that make actions (e.g. learning) feasible and in normative affordances that signal which actions (e.g. learning) are expected and valued. To test whether the home learning workspaces of 84 German third- and fourth-grade students were related to their achievements, 282 teacher-education students rated anonymized photographs of these workspaces using the sociotope approach. To complement this, the elementary students also provided self-reports on their home learning workspaces. Grade point average (GPA) served as the achievement indicator, and socioeconomic status (SES) was included as a control variable. Higher-achieving students’ workspaces received more favorable third-party ratings of the feasibility of learning actions and normative support for learning, although not all workspace characteristics differed between achievement groups. Third-party ratings of the workspaces predicted achievement-group membership and provided information beyond SES. Self-reported workspace characteristics also predicted GPA and explained additional variance beyond SES. The findings are consistent with viewing home learning workspaces as structured constellations of affordances and highlight the value of combining third-party and learner perspectives when examining academic achievement.