Revista de Engenharia Civil e Ambiental

The Impact of the Quality Designed Learning Environment on a Child's Behavior in Kindergarten Stage

Abstract

Afaq Basheer Arabyat*

The early years of childhood are of great importance because children's growth rate is high physically and intellectually. An ambience should be provided that allows children to use the best of their childhood. Most of public schools' kindergartens in Jordan were not actually meant to be a child care centre; this study has revealed that the quality of the physical and social environment affects child development in this education process, and that kindergartens have a major influence on child development since these are places where children spend most of their preschool time. In order to improve the conditions of the physical environment, designers can try to reach best design solutions, by getting children’s ideas about their educational environment. Data for this study were collected in library method, first investigates previous studies on designing kindergartens and children’s demands and their importance, and then investigates the IEQ of public kindergartens in Jordan "a kindergarten in As Salt -as a case study- ". The questions that the children were asked in this study aimed to learn children’s evaluations and expectations about their settings. The most important result reached in the study was the observation of the ability of 5 year-old (between 48-60 months of age) and 6 year-old (between 60-72 months of age) group of children to construct successful verbal statements about their physical environment by referring to their own experience. In short, this study has demonstrated that kindergarten design can be approached under three main headings, namely organization of the environment, selection of materials, and detail solutions, based on pre-schoolers’ experience.