Australia has been the site of significant school facility design innovation during the past decade. This innovation was showcased in 2013 in a report released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) titled "Innovative Learning Environments, Educational Research and Innovation." It featured case studies of 40…

The data discussed in this speech are taken from a large, three-year study that investigated the whole process of open-plan schooling. The study included a national survey of schools in Britain and a series of onsite observations. The analyses reported here derived from the observation of 552 pupils in grades 2 and 4 using the Pupil Behavior…

This speech discusses computer lab/classrooms and the issue of properly combining space, pedagogy, and technology when facility planning to better enhance student learning and support the teaching process. Several case studies illustrate classroom computer workstation configurations and how these may help or impede student learning and…

The social contexts students need to encourage productive collaboration in their writing can be provided by attending to various design features of the English microcomputer laboratory. Collaborative learning offers a powerful alternative to traditional classroom teaching methods and helps students become part of a community that approximates the…

This paper provides architects and educational planners with data on the necessary space requirements for restrooms, mechanical rooms, custodial spaces, food service, construction enclosure space, and circulation and corridor space, as well as an ongoing indication of necessary building area per student. It offers itemized data to illustrate…

This symposium consists of four papers presented as part of the program of the American Psychological Association's Division on the Teaching of Psychology. The initial paper, by Ludy Benjamin, describes the results of a survey, conducted in 1980, of 504 psychology laboratories. It includes information on departments that have undertaken laboratory…

This paper discusses the developmentally appropriate design of child care centers, focusing on the qualities or properties of center design that have been proven to influence child development. The paper suggests that the design of child care centers can be considered in terms of the five main steps in planning and designing a child care facility.…

Defining stress as a "misfit" between individual needs and environmental attributes, this paper reviews research on areas where the designed environment, on both a schoolwide and a classroom level, interacts with the educational process. These interactions are considered from the perspective of stresses imposed on both teachers and students. The…

The most persistent question in the field of school facility planning relates to that of the relationship between the built environment and the performance and behavior of users, particularly students. Ways in which the built environment affects two student variables--student achievement and student behavior--are explored. The first variable is…

The relationships between schools' physical environments and the teachers who work in them were explored. Eleven middle school teachers were interviewed about their orientation toward and operation in their schools. They were asked what they thought were their schools' most important features, how they felt about the buildings, what were its good…