Evaluation of the Indoor Thermal Quality in high schools buildings: strengths and limits of different assessment methods

Recent studies have pointed out how much the indoor environmental quality in schools’ classrooms is an important factor which could prevent serious adverse effects not only on the students’ comfort sensation, but also on their health and learning potential. However, although standards EN ISO 7726:2001, EN ISO 7730:2005 and EN 10551:2001 give recommendations about how to practically perform objective and subjective measurements, on the evaluation of the level of comfort perceived in buildings, there is the need to define a systematic and standardized way in order to implement the comfort assessment through a methodical and uniform approach. In this work the assessment of the Indoor Thermal Quality of two classrooms in one high school located in Treviso, a town in the North-East of Italy, is presented in order to highlight the strengths and the limits of two different evaluation approaches: field monitoring, survey questionnaires. To reach the aim, two monitoring and surveys campaigns were carried out, one during the spring and one during the heating season. All the four comfort areas were investigated through the questionnaires: the thermal, the visual, the acoustic and the air quality perception.. Afterwards objective and subjective responses on thermal and visual perception have been compared.