The Effects of Indoor Environmental Factors on Students' Academic Achievement

摘要

The objective of this study is to investigate the impacts of indoor environmental factors on students' academic achievement. The thermal, indoor air quality (IAQ), acoustics, and lighting conditions gathered from 220 classrooms in the Midwest region of the United States were studied. The data have been collected under occupied and unoccupied conditions for two days in three seasons from 2015-2017. IAQ and thermal measurements included the indoor concentration of carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, the count of particles with aerosol diameters ranging from 0.3 μm to 2.5 μm and aerosol diameters ranging from 2.5 μm to 10 μm, air temperature, relative humidity, and globe temperature. View, daylighting, and electric lighting data were collected for lighting condition. Assorted background and occupied noise levels and room impulse responses from which reverberation times are extrapolated were collected for acoustics data. In addition, demographics and students' performance data were included in this study. The field measurements revealed that all classrooms meet IES recommended illuminance level for reading and writing but only 20% of classrooms in this study meet the ASHRAE Std. 62.1 ventilation rate requirements. In comparison to ANSI S12.60, 91% of the classrooms do not meet the recommended maximum background noise level for unoccupied conditions, while 15% do not meet the recommended maximum reverberation time. Statistical analysis is currently in progress. These analyses include: (1) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to define latent variable constructs that describe the indoor environmental quality, and (2) structural equation modeling (SEM) to evaluate the correlation of these indoor environmental factors and student's academic achievement.