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 nonclassroom
factors, followed by temperature, air quality, artificial lighting, room layout and software.