Post-Occupancy Evaluation of the Acoustic Performance of an Architecture Faculty Lecture Room Using Objective and Subjective Data

Acoustic comfort is one of the important parameters determining the interior quality of educational buildings by affecting speech intelligibility and students' cognitive performance in learning environments. This study comprehensively examines the acoustic performance of a lecture room used for undergraduate education in the Faculty of Architecture of a university in Türkiye, using objective and subjective data within the framework of the Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) approach. In this context, the study measures the reverberation time of the lecture room according to relevant standards and evaluates students' perceptions of acoustic comfort through a questionnaire covering noise and its sources, seating position, speech intelligibility, spatial acoustic quality, and the behavioral effects of acoustic conditions. The findings show that the lecture room does not meet the recommended reverberation time limit and requires improvement, particularly for speech-based educational activities. The results also show that, although the low level of student satisfaction is generally consistent with the physical measurements, the analysis does not reveal a statistically significant relationship between reverberation time and user perception. This finding indicates that acoustic comfort cannot be explained by a single physical parameter. The study concludes that seating position, speaker-student distance, noise, and visual/auditory communication conditions should be evaluated together.