Enhancing Health and Performance of Students in a Learning Environment through a Digital Pre-Occupancy Toolset

The learning environment, including its physical designelements, has been shown to contribute significantly tostudent performance outcomes. However, the existingliterature about such effects relies primarily on casualobservations rather than on rigorous empirical testing.Broad trends in environmental impacts have beennoted, but there is an overall lack of empirical evidenceabout how specific aspects of the physical environmentcan affect learning performance. This research aims todevelop a digital pre-occupancy toolset to understandthe impact of different interior design variables (independentvariables) on learning performance (dependentvariable). In this multi-stage study, we first use interviewswith students and educators to help identify hypothesesabout the relationship between specific interior designvariables and effective learning experiences. We thendevelop a digital toolset to quantitatively measure theeffect of these design variables. The toolset is basedon an Augmented Reality approach. Wearing a virtualrealityheadset allows participants to experience videofootage of the same classroom lecture, but with specificfeatures of the environment altered (ceiling height, viewsand visual access to nature, and wall texture). Variousquantitative tests will be conducted to measure learners’responses to these three variables and their capacity toassimilate lecture material within the different parametricenvironments. Identifying and testing these specificelements among different student groups can help interiordesigners to better succeed in creating supportivespaces for learners. The digital toolset is developed witha consideration toward flexibility, so that it can be readilyadapted by future researchers and designers to investigatethe potential effects of additional interior designvariables and their relationship to other human factors(such as stress responses, visual memory, etc.).

Volume Editors
Luis Francisco Rico-Gutierrez & Martha Thorne

ISBN
978-1-944214-08-1