The environmental comfort factors toward children performance at child care centres / Nur Idayu Zulkifli

It is known from previous research that environmental comfort is very important in human life because it affects human's productivity and performance. Good environmental conditions is important for the comfort of children at child care centre (CCC). The environmental comfort of CCC should be appropriate to ensure positive development among young children because inappropriate environmental comfort condition at CCC causes negative influences on children's performance. The aim of this study is to investigate the quality of environmental comfort conditions at CCCs and its effect on children's performance at CCCs in Shah Alam. Data were collected through observation on environmental comfort at CCCs and questionnaire on the performance of young children within the ages of two to four years old. The investigation were conducted at 21 registered CCCs in Shah Alam within May, June, September, October, November and December 2016. Data were analysed using SPSS version 23. Descriptive statistics were used to measure environmental comfort factors which consisted of temperature, relative humidity, air velocity, noise level and illuminance. The analysis also includes mean scores for five aspects on children's performance elements. It includes communication with caregivers, communication with friends, attendance and health status, indoor activities and outdoor activities. Inferential statistic was applied through the Spearman's Rank Correlation in order to measure the relationship between environmental comfort condition and children's performance. The main finding was that the overall environmental comfort conditions that have been measured at CCCs exceeded the thermal comfort recommended standards range of the MS 1525:2014, ISO 7730:2005 and ASHRAE 55-2010. However, even though the overall environmental comfort condition were poor, the findings found that the overall children's performance score of young children at CCCs in Shah Alam achieved good score range. The study proved that environmental comfort components has an impact on the children's performance. However, the result shows that the performance of children at CCCs in Shah Alam were not highly affected by the poor environmental comfort conditions. The effect is not too significant due to a low percentage of correlation. The result shows that, children's performance does not really depend on environmental comfort factors only but may also depend on other factors as well.