Assessment of students' productivity in context of indoor environmental quality and personal factors

This study investigates the impact of personal factors on students' productivity and relation with Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) parameters through thermal comfort in a university classroom. The research is based on experimental research involving measurements, 240 productivity tests created for the purpose of the research and participation of 99 respondents. Paper proposes a novel approach, correlating personal occupants' parameters with thermal comfort and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) parameters that affect productivity. The novel approach implies the inclusion of all experimentally measured parameters that affect productivity in the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) calculation, with the aim of distinguishing the impact caused by personal factors alone. This approach has not been used before and presents a significant gap between the existing prediction calculation models in literature and results obtained in real environments. The differences between calculated and measured productivity in real environments can be substantial, reaching over 80%. Approximately 80% of measured productivity values within the PMV range of −0.25–1 are impacted by personal factors. The importance of personal factors might be greater concerning how often they affect productivity, as opposed to the extent of their influence.