State guidelines for educational specifications and school facility adequacy

The design of public school facilities is important for educators concerned with curriculum change and sophistication of information delivery. In the absence of guidelines for facility design, educators and architects can fail to solve design problems that inhibit program development. The purpose of this study was to determine if, in the opinion of selected classroom teachers, the required use of state-adopted educational specifications guidelines when constructing or modernizing urban high school facilities had resulted in more adequate housing for programs than the perceived adequacy by classroom teachers in newly constructed or modernized urban school facilities in states without such guidelines. Data for the study were obtained through a survey of high school classroom teachers in January and February of 1991. Teachers in six states participated in the survey. Three of the six states had educational specifications guidelines in place and three did not; the respondents were grouped accordingly. The research hypothesis for this study was: High school classroom teachers have a significantly more positive opinion of the adequacy of their school's facilities in states that require the use of state-adopted educational specifications than do those in states without such requirements. In formulating the statistical hypotheses, the.05 level of significance was set for the analysis of data. The Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks test was used to determine the significance of any difference in the distribution of scores of the two groups surveyed. The conclusion from the study was that high school facilities are more adequate for instruction programs when constructed according to state-adopted guidelines for the development of educational specifications documents. This conclusion applied to the following features of a school facility: (1) location and site, (2) structural, mechanical, electrical, maintenance features, and (3) educational adequacy in academic, special, and support areas. The existence of state guidelines was found to have no significant affect on perceptions of external aesthetic appearance of the facility, although the perceptions of facility adequacy related to internal environmental features were higher among the teachers in states with guidelines.