Sustainable Learning Environments: Awareness Based Assessment Methods for School Buildings in Qatar

The educational process in schools involves many activities that ultimately aim at testing students' motivation, knowledge assimilation, academic performance, and teachers' productivity. How these activities are accommodated in a responsive environment is a critical issue that deserves special attention especially from users' perspective. This research analyzes emerging understandings of sustainable learning environments. Reactions of teachers and children from six schools representing the three educational systems within Qatar are gathered and analyzed. This was materialized by the development and implementation of an awareness based assessment mechanism. It involved awareness based tools that seek feedback from users on classroom and cluster prototypes, environmental and image preferences, and sustainable design aspects, while relating them to a number of spatial requirements and educational objectives. The results of this investigation support the assumption on how the school environment has a direct impact on the way in which teaching and learning takes place, and how different user types perceive, comprehend, and develop impressions about their environment. Research Team:

Ashraf Salama (Principal Investigator);
Tarek Sayed (Co-Investigator);

Student Researchers:
Shorook Bassam Abdoh , Maha Saud Al-Khalifa , Maha Al-Mashtoly , Aisha Ali Al-Motawa , Fatemah Sulaiti and Noora Omar Al-Amri

Envisioning the need for going beyond adopting prescriptive measures to address the quality of the learning of environment is conceived by highlighting the need to utilize knowledge generated from research findings into school design process, to pursue active roles in sensitizing users about the value of the school environment in reaching the desired academic performance while increasing teachers' productivity.