Effects of environmental factors on university teachers’ performance from Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected schooling since university professors must switch to online and remote learning. Working from home requires adaptation to new noise, temperature, and lighting conditions, and those factors affect the instructors’ job effectiveness. Objective: To examine and measure how noise, temperature and lighting conditions affect a professor's job effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A questionnaire was first developed to obtain information to test the hypotheses, including the hypothesized model variables: Noise, temperature, lighting (independent variables), and performance (dependent variable). The independent variables contained three items each, while the dependent variable contained eight items, evaluated with a five-point Likert-type scale. Subsequently, the online questionnaires were sent to Latin American university professors, Excel® automatically recorded the data, and SPSS 25® software was used for the analysis. A structural equation model was created, and WarpPLS 8.0 software and data from 257 responders were used to test the hypotheses. Results: 119 (46.30%) of surveyed teachers were male, and 138 (53.70%) were female. Most of them (32.68%) were 40–50 years old, while the minority (5.45%) were between 20–30 years of age. Regarding the effects on performance, Noise had an effect of 0.22, Temperature one of 0.20, and Lighting one of 0.21. These variables explained 29% of the variance in teachers’ performance. Conclusions: Noise, lighting and temperature directly and positively affect teachers’ performance, such as class quality, student learning and growth, and society's sustainability.