Studies in the 20th century have proven that the satisfaction of employees in the office workplace greatly affects their productivity. Similarly, studies in the late 1900s and early 2000s have proven that several classroom factors affect student satisfaction, which also affects their academic performance. These studies proved that factors like temperature, lighting, and air quality have significant impacts on student performance. For example, Harner (1974) found out in his analysis that reading and mathematics skills are adversely affected by temperatures above 74ºF. He also found out that the ideal temperature for learning in reading and mathematics is in the range between 68º and 74º.
To clarify, when mentioning ‘school facilities’, I am not only referring to classrooms and the whole school building in general, like other studies, but also to different kinds of facilities, namely, the classroom, the computer laboratory, the TLE workshop, the science laboratory, the library, and the gymnasium.
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Numerous studies that look into the factors that affect academic performance have been conducted, for they help educational institutions determine which factors need to be changed or upgraded. However, since budget needs to be considered, they also need to determine which upgrades would be the most efficient or which upgrades would positively affect most of their students. For example, a study conducted by Earthman (2002) showed that classroom overcrowding affects minority/poverty students more than other groups. This means that institutions with poorer students should look more into this when renovating, but institutions with students of other economic groups do not have to look into this as much.
According to Penn State University, school facilities affect health, behavior, engagement, learning, and growth in achievement. Factors include temperature, aesthetics, adequacy of devices and instruments, room size, seating comfort, and lighting. These factors are present in some studies conducted by researchers. As of now, researchers of these studies have noticed that their school facilities like the science labs, computer labs, TLE workshops, and the gymnasium don’t have that many ideal attributes, and this may affect student satisfaction.
Some students are financially struggling to do their tasks especially when it comes to practical subjects like computers and TLE. Although there may be some students who can just make sure that they can do their projects at home, it should be noted that the school should provide the students' needs for the effectiveness of learning experiences since not everyone has the luxury to do their tasks at home. Nowadays, many schools cannot provide sufficient materials and facilities that aid in learning. In the end, students resort to either learning it themselves without surely knowing if it is right because of the lack of guidance or lose the will to learn since most of the time students become uninterested when they find it a hassle to teach themselves. The same goes for facilities. There are many activities that are not meant to be done inside the classrooms. These include ‘hands-on’ activities which should let the students learn outside of discussions and experience personally themselves. Without proper facilities, hands-on activities become less, which hinders the students learning. This applies when teaching. When a student does his/her task and if there are sufficient school facilities, then the students are willing to efficiently use these facilities and enhance their creativity by searching for more possibilities in improving their work. There is clearly a big difference when a student works at home. Students cannot efficiently work at home since it’s not designed for working. In the end, students simply submit only satisfactory tasks that complete the given criteria instead of striving for better work.
Most of the studies so far focus on classroom attributes and other attributes of school buildings in general, but not much has looked into the different school facilities, e.g., libraries, computer laboratories, science laboratories, etc., and how much these facilities impact the academic performance of students. It is a given already that schools of the modern age need different facilities to cater to the needs of 21st-century learners. However, little is known about how much these facilities affect students' academic performance and which facilities affect student performance the most and the least. I believe this area is still worth studying because at least it is a factor that schools can control to help influence the academic performance of their students.
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