This study seeks to determine students' sense of community outcomes based on experiences with different residence hall architectural designs. Sense of community is a "feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their…

Professional cost estimators are widely used by architects during the design phases of a project to provide preliminary cost estimates. These estimates may begin at the conceptual design phase and are prepared at regular intervals through the construction document phase. Estimating professionals are frequently tasked with "selling" the importance…

The article aims to find predictors of study success from a teacher's perspective that relate to the built environment. The research is based on a national online survey among 1752 teachers at 18 Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences. Multivariate data analyses were used to test the hypothesis that the quality of spatial and functional aspects at…

This dissertation examines the architecture and social intent of Student Union buildings. The narrative reaches back to the first quarter of the twentieth century when students and college leaders in the Midwest and Northeast formed the Association of College Unions, but focuses on the postwar period in California when Student Unions became…

Just days before a massive tornado devastated their community last May, a group of Joplin, Mo., educators and other community members had a meeting about "21st-century learning." Then May 22 arrived, bringing the catastrophic storm that ripped through the community of 50,000 in the southwest corner of the state. The tornado killed 161…

For several years, schools and universities have been battered by a sputtering economy that on many campuses has brought about slashed budgets, curtailed programs, shuttered facilities and terminated employees. But throughout the gloomy financial conditions, one of the bright spots for education institutions is the continued growing embrace of…

Renovating, expanding or building new libraries today is a challenge on several levels. Libraries in general are faced with image issues, such as the assumption that a library building exists only to house print material followed by the equally erroneous assumption that everything is now available online, thus rendering a physical building…

Sensory experiences are the foundation of the learning process, regardless of cognitive ability. However, within the context of students with special needs, the sensory experience may focus on therapeutic and psychological relaxation without necessarily having clearly defined educational goals that directly improve learning. The frequently used…

Facility managers everywhere are tasked with improving energy efficiency to control costs. Those strides cannot be achieved at the expense of system performance and reliability, or the comfort of the people within those properties. There are few places where this is truer than in schools and universities. K-12 schools and university lecture spaces…

Three Dimensional or 3D virtual reality has become increasingly popular in many areas, especially in building a digital campus. This paper introduces a virtual campus, which is based on a 3D model of The Tourism and Culture College of Yunnan University (TCYU). Production of the virtual campus was aided by Human Factor and Ergonomics (HF&E), an…

The movement to extend universal design from physical to instructional environments has escalated in the past two decades. Frameworks to guide the field of postsecondary education in its efforts to intentionally build accessibility features into college teaching and course materials include Universal Design in Education, Universal Design for…

The primary goal of this study is to examine green environmental practices exercised in maintaining healthy schools in Atlanta. A forty-item researcher-developed instrument was used to survey 30 randomly sampled schools in the Atlanta area. Five schools particularly strong in green environment implementation were visited to observe their green…

The Federal Government's recent Building the Education Revolution program resulted in, among other features, the creation of over 600 new school libraries in Queensland alone. This paper reports on a component of a research project carried out with students in six primary schools and one secondary school that benefitted from the program,…

Learning spaces are mission-critical for colleges and universities. Yet institutions lack a commonly accepted set of standards for learning spaces, lack a way to measure how well they work through a third-party certification, and lack a substantive way to compare their spaces to peer and aspirant institutions. Inspired by the success of…

This study was conducted at the early stages of integrating LEED into the design process in which a clearer understanding of what sustainable and ecological design was about became evident through the duration of designing and building of two academic buildings on a university campus. In this case study, due to utilizing a grounded theory…