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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1348483
This article is part of the Research Topic Quality of Life in Academia: New Perspectives for Assessing and Promoting Wellbeing in University Population View all 11 articles

Students' Perceived Restorativeness of university environment: the validation of the Rest@U Scale

Provisionally accepted
Elisa Menardo Elisa Menardo 1Margherita Brondino Margherita Brondino 2*Ottavia Damian Ottavia Damian 1Marco Lezcano Marco Lezcano 1Camilla Marossi Camilla Marossi 1Margherita Pasini Margherita Pasini 1
  • 1 Department of Human Science, University of Verona, Verona, Veneto, Italy
  • 2 University of Verona, Verona, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    University students are likely to encounter mental health issues throughout their educational journey. Among the various factors that can impact students' well-being, the physical environment can potentially restore cognitive, physiological, and emotional resources, thereby enhancing academic performance, and overall quality of life, while reducing feelings of stress and depression. The Perceived Restorativeness Scale is the most commonly used tool to assess the level of restorativeness derived from the educational physical environment. However, a tailored measure could be a more psychometrically suitable approach to capture the context-specific characteristics of university environments for academic students. This study aims to validate an instrument that can accurately evaluate university spaces to measure the perceived restorativeness of university students. A total sample of 685 students from two Italian universities participated in the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Restorativeness at University scale (Rest@US), consisting of 13 items divided into four dimensions: Fascination, Being-away, Scope, and Coherence. The hypothesized four-factor model (Being-away, Fascination, Scope, and Coherence) demonstrated excellent fit indices in both the calibration and validation samples and was invariant for sex. The scale demonstrates good reliability. Furthermore, criterion validity has been confirmed, highlighting that, in a theoretically consistent manner, the perceived restorativeness of university physical environments from the point of view of students and its dimensions were negatively correlated with techno-overload and study-related workload and positively correlated with perceived performance and psycho-physical well-being.

    Keywords: Restorativeness1, Academia2, students3, validation4, Environment5. (Min.5-Max. 8)

    Received: 03 Dec 2023; Accepted: 12 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Menardo, Brondino, Damian, Lezcano, Marossi and Pasini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Margherita Brondino, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.