School Environment
The school environment combines the physical, social, and educational
aspects. It pertains to the set of resources that the school offers. The facilities cover
everything from classrooms to infrastructure to health and sanitation to teacherstudent interactions to moral or social ideals. A conducive learning environment is
one that a school creates for its students. And it is one of the most important
aspects that parents consider when assessing a student's development
According to Olivos & Amerigo (2010), physical circumstances such as density,
privacy, activity areas, open spaces, and even green spaces are key components of
a positive school environment. Since they have properties that have an impact on
people's behavior, noise, lighting, colors, temperature, humidity, decoration, and
furniture have some of the physical effects that have been studied the most.
However, despite finding evidence of these effects, the findings are not entirely
conclusive. The behavior and cognitive, social, and emotional development of
children can be directly affected by the quality of these environments in school
infrastructure Prescott & David (1976) Wohlwill & Heft (1987) Moore et al., (2003).
In other words, the school environment is viewed as a didactic agent that
contributes to providing the optimal conditions for the growth of the teachinglearning process. Additionally, it enables the establishment of an atmosphere that
is suitable for the development of students' skills, encouraging both student
autonomy and teacher motivation.
In the literature that already exists, this has been thoroughly researched to
present a detailed and complete model of school environments. We have taken
into account contributions from Thapa et al. (2013), who identify five dimensions
that converge in security, social relations, teaching and learning, the institutional
environment (both physical and administrative), and the process of school
improvement; as well as those from Bradshaw et al. (2014), who suggested that
there are three elements that affect the formation of safe and supportive school
models, including the variables of commitment, safety, and support. Despite their
effectiveness in identifying certain important aspects of the school environment,
both studies represent the development of research in this field and still struggle
due to a dearth of relevant factors.
An extensive review of the published empirical research leads to the
conclusion that there are three main categories that can be used to categorize the
school environment. These categories are: (a) physical, which refers to the
condition of school facilities and the environmental quality of schools and their
relationship with the educational performance and behavior of students; (b)
academic, where it is mentioned that the personal skills and characteristics of
teachers serve as factors for the development of their students; and finally, (c)
social, which suggests that the quality of relationships between members of the
school community is fundamental in the configuration of the school climate. These
categories form a conceptual framework that can be viewed as a multidimensional
construction of the elements and circumstances of a supportive or safe learning
environment (Kutsyuruba et al., 2015).