The Role of Built Environments in Student Interactions at School

Schools are the gathering place and places for the social activity of students and like the beating heart, are the centers for all forces, events, and the gathering place of values. They play an important social role in the collective life of students. As a place of communication, the school must have a wide range of qualities to allow people to interact and ultimately promote learning. The purpose of this article is to interpret and analyze the strategies and principles adopted to establish social interaction in school to promote learning by reviewing studies on the sociopetality of space. This is an applied research study in terms of purpose that uses descriptive-analytical methodology. The required data were collected using desk research and a questionnaire. The statistical population consists of a panel of experts, and the samples are randomly selected. The effective social interaction components were then analyzed and prioritized based on the questionnaire indicators using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The collected questionnaires were analyzed using the Expert Choice software. The results showed that the mental criteria had the highest importance coefficient and the physical criterion had the lowest importance coefficient. On the other hand, the prioritization of sub-indicicators showed that the sub-indicators of "length of stay" belonged to the behavioral criterion, and the sub-indicators of "accessibility of public space", such as class, belonging to the physical criterion, had the highest importance. The reason is that an improvement in these criteria will lead to greater student satisfaction and increased social interaction.