Relationship between educational furniture design and cognitive error

Abstract

Introduction: Learners’ cognitive error plays a significant role in teaching-learning processes. This study is aimed to investigate the relationship between educational furniture design and cognitive error. Methods: Thirty 18–22 years old students participated in the experiment. Four educational furniture, with different ergonomic characteristics were chosen. The furniture included two types of arm table student chairs (type 1 & 2), one set of library chair and desk (type 3) and one set of adjustable chair and desk (type 4). Each participant spent 90 min on each type of furniture while reading a book and making some notes. A before-after experiment designed to assess cognitive errors by Stroop Test. Paired T-test analysis was used for statistical comparisons at the.05 confidence level in SPSS software. Findings: Comparison before-after errors showed that chairs of type 1 and type 2 could increase errors respectively.86 (P-value =.034) and.63 (P-value =.039). The increasing errors by furniture of type 3 was.40 (P-value =.184). Furniture of type 4 made errors reduction up to.16 (P-value =.517). Comparison between arm table (group 1) and separated table (group 2) showed that group 1 significantly increased errors up to.75 (P-value =.003). Group 2 has insignificantly increased error to.11. Conclusion: The findings revealed a relationship between the ergonomic characteristics of the educational furniture and the number of cognitive errors, as the more ergonomics characteristics of the furniture, the less error. There is also an error percentage reduction using separated chair and desk.