Teachers’ Views of their Primary School Classrooms:
Referees’ Comments and Authors’ Responses
Referees’ comments
Reviewer 1
The study is interesting, because is important to
the scientific community to know the opinion of
key actors in schools, as the teachers.
Abstract – rephrase the sentence:
“The teachers appear to be aware of the “hard”
aspects of the physical environment, but less
conscious of the impact of “softer” aspects,
especially the level of stimulation created”
Authors’ responses
Agreed.
Agreed and changed.
should be
“The teachers appear to be aware of the “hard”
aspects of the physical environment, but less
conscious of the impact of “softer” aspects,
especially those with impact on the level of
stimulation created”
Page 6
“Of course this is a view from a group of
teachers, but it does raise an interesting question
to be addressed through further research: “is our
school design improving and is it building on the
lessons of the past?”
I think the question is very simplistic, because the
characteristics of the buildings were adapted to
the reality of each period. I think it would be
useful to the relationship between the density of
occupation (and perhaps also the volume)
classrooms and age schools.
Page 16 – table 5
The sentence “Also, more electrical lightning with
higher quality can provide a better visual
environment” is also arguable, being in terms of
health, being in terms of energy efficiency. It
should be preferable to provide a better visual
environment using natural light and using
appropriate tools for attain it.
Reviewer: 2
In general, valuable information about classroom
conditions can be obtained by interviewing
teachers.
We can see the point being raised here, which is
essentially what is it about, especially 1950s
classrooms, that teachers seem to like? As this is
a qualitative paper for which the basis is the
views of the teachers, we have actively
responded to this query by tracking across the
characteristics and identified those where
particularly low problem scores are evident for
1950s classrooms in contrast to the later schools.
We have also removed the polemical question as
inappropriate (sorry about that) and replaced it
with a more objective observation about not
assuming old is bad.
We know what is being suggested here and if
good quality natural lighting could provide
sufficient light for the whole of the school day /
year that might well be the ideal. However, in
practice there are parts of the classroom, times
of day and times of the year when the natural
lighting is not sufficient and this is where the
need for good quality artificial lighting is
essential. In Table 5 this comes in the left-hand
column and is in fact a finding given and justified
in an earlier paper regarding impacts on learning
(see note 1 to the table). The right-hand column
does highlight that teachers appear to
underestimate the importance of daylight. For
these reasons and in this context we feel the text
should stand.
Agreed, but it has implications for the nature of
the analysis that is possible, which is a recurrent
theme below.
The analyses should take into account the
clustered nature of the data: teachers from the
same school are more likely to report similarly
then teachers from different schools. Also
seasonal variation should be considered, since
the interviews were conducted over one year
period. For example thermal conditions and
perception of indoor air quality are likely to
change by season.
Other important confounding factors are not
considered, such as teachers' characteristics (e.g.
age, gender, level of education and experience,
years working in the same classroom). Sample
size limitations need to be discussed.
The format of some questions presented in Table
1 appears unclear, so I would suggest adding
some discussion about the formulation of the
prompts. Are these validated questions or are
there any references?
I would find it interesting to relate the subjective
perception of the teachers to objective
measurements of classroom thermal conditions,
indoor air quality, noise, and lighting, but it is
unclear if any such measurements were done.
Connections to pupils’ learning progress are not
well explained and it leaves it open how these
results were obtained and/or how they relate to
the current work. … It appears that the paper
describes one part of a larger study, but it is not
clearly presented so the reader cannot easily put
this piece of work into a larger context.
The issue of seasonal variation was one of the
key reasons for interviewing teachers about their
experience of the classroom over the whole year.
We have highlighted this in the text to reinforce
this point. We did in reality gain useful
information across the seasons from the
individual teachers, for example, overheating in
the Summer and problems with cold in the
Winter. On the suggestion that teachers from the
same school are likely to report similarly, this is
something that we can’t test per se as this is not
a statistical study (see next box below). But we
do discuss some aspects that seem to reflect
common school characteristics in 3.2 and note
there that we also found quite considerable
variations in some cases too.
We did not collect demographic data about the
teachers as the driving force for the sample
selection was to provide diversity in the
classrooms (we have amended it from schools)
analyzed so that the findings about the teachers’
views would be independent of any particular
school type. This mirrors Marten (2002)’s
approach and is explained in section 2.2. As to
sample size, it would seem uncontentious that
although 222 would only be a moderate sample
size for a questionnaire survey, it is a large
sample for face-to-face interviews with
qualitative analysis based on detailed notes of
the discussion.
The questions included covered areas that seem
likely to emerge based on our previous POEs etc,
but they were there as a back up after an initial
general enquiry. Apologies we had missed this
last out from Table 1 before, so we have now
added this and deleted one column as
superfluous making the table simpler and clearer.
The associated text has been augmented to
reflect these changes and to mention that a
Likert scale was used for the final question.
We do not have the data to do this as only spot
measures were taken and as distinct from the
views over the whole year that were sought from
the teachers. However we do compare a more
measurement-based, statistical analysis of the
classrooms, published in a previous paper and
summarized in the Introduction, with these
subjective users’ views in the final Table 5 and
comment as to synergies and differences.
The measurement-based, statistical analysis and
results regarding pupils’ learning are freely
available in a previously published paper in
“Building and Environment”. We have briefly
summarized them in the Introduction as they
were part of the same study as these results and
the thrust of the paper is to give visibility to the
teachers’ views alongside this complementary
methodology. The second paragraph of the
Introduction makes this relationship between the
parts of the HEAD study explicit. We do think this
is clear, but are open to suggestions.