A study on student perceptions of higher education classrooms: Impact of classroom attributes on student satisfaction and performance

Exploring how classroom attributes affect student satisfaction and performance in higher education classrooms continues to be a critical initiative among educators and researchers. Although specific classroom attributes and their impacts on student satisfaction and performance have been investigated independently, a holistic investigation of many of these attributes and their individual and cumulative impacts on student perceptions of their learning environments is missing. This paper takes a statistical approach to assess ambient, spatial, and technological attributes that can be found in higher education classrooms through an online survey conducted in six classrooms in a university. The paper provides insight for future evaluation of higher education learning environments by linking two Likert scales: one rating student satisfaction with classroom attributes and the other rating the impact of these attributes on student performance, and by analyzing the relationships between reported perceptions and student evaluations of different conditions. The results revealed that student perceptions rely heavily on spatial attributes, specifically visibility and furniture, and ambient attributes, specifically air quality and temperature, which are highly impacted by the design, management and maintenance of classrooms. The paper also investigated the impacts of non-classroom factors, including gender, seating location, cumulative GPA, college year and expected course grade, on student perceptions of learning environments. Results showed that perceptions of visibility, acoustics and furniture were more sensitive to non-classroom factors, followed by temperature, air quality, artificial lighting, room layout and software. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.