The effect of quality of closed educational space on the amount of user sense of community

Given the basic needs of humans in various social, emotional, intellectual and physical aspects, the current learning environment is far from reaching the living and active space, the place to encounter, experience, and so on. various studies show that collective sense has the greatest impact on the participation of individuals in the performance of the environment. the collective sense is multidimensional, and the place must be somewhere for a collective sense among users. One of the missions of designers and architects is to create a proportionate relationship between humans and the environment around them. To achieve this goal, the creators of space must have a correct understanding of human behavior in different environments to strengthen the connection between man and place. Studies of learning environments have grown significantly over the past 30 years and many studies have been done on the relationship between the classroom environment and student learning. The history of studies of educational spaces shows that these environments have been less studied from sociocultural aspects. The school environment has been studied as a social learning environment for the last four decades. This indicates that the spatial features of the school building can increase or decrease opportunities for interaction between students, which in turn affects the level of socialization, awareness and knowledge of others and the level of collective feeling.

Based on available literature, the five-dimensional model of the richness of place, social ties and interaction, collective activity, security, and sense of belonging and identity were extracted as the most effective criteria for revealing collective sense. to evaluate the theoretical model, three schools were selected from among high schools in Tehran and appropriate questionnaires were distributed among them. the research sample consisted of 750 people who have been selected by random sampling method. content analysis method was used in theoretical part to categorize the views and the case study was used for doing the research. the research method is factor analysis.

The factor load of each measure in the theoretical model was determined and finally, 11 final strategies for designing the educational environment were explained.

This study seeks to evaluate the relationship between collective sense and the quality of educational spaces. Closed educational spaces are the platform for social interactions between users, so it is necessary to review and pay special attention to the design of educational closed spaces as a collective space in many types of education today. The results of this study emphasize the importance of spatial features on the evaluation of collective feeling in place. Accordingly, the mental-psychological and behavioral-activity dimensions are other effective criteria in the collective feeling among users. The presented results are the first step in analyzing and evaluating the closed educational space. The results of this research can be considered as the starting point to evaluate and review the closed educational spaces and become the basis for developing a design guide to improve the quality of the closed educational space.