Evaluation of environmental factors affecting student stress in educational spaces based on Shannon entropy

Stress is one of the important issues in modern societies and in fact an inevitable part of people’s lives. Educational environment are among the environments where people experience stress. Therefore, identification and extraction of environmental stressors to reduce them and increase spatial relaxation is the main objective of the present study. In this research, survey methodology and Delphi technique have been used to answer the research questions. This study has focused on the attitude of experts and professors in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and architecture. In this regard, library resources were first studied and reviewed, and then open-ended interviews were conducted with twelve psychiatrists, psychologists, and professors in these areas in Shiraz, Iran. Then, Shannon’s content analysis method was used to analyze the information and extract the effective components of stress in educational environment according to the weight coefficients for their importance and acceptability. In the next step, the grouping of the contributing factors into four distinct categories was done by five professors in the field of architecture. The results indicate that independent variables have different degrees of impact on the dependent variable. Noise and inappropriate lighting were identified as the most important environmental components increasing the stress level. Congestion was determined as the most important psycho-social variable while inadequate availability of space and colors were suggested as significant physical and spatial components of stress. The conclusion of this study is some design strategies that are suggested to help in reducing stressors such as educational space location, arrangement, neighboring, shape, noise, heating, and cooling, ….