Thermal comfort of adolescent children in classrooms: Some reflections on the state-of-the-art

Thermal comfort of adolescents (10-17 year olds) in school classrooms is an important but less explored topic. The classroom thermal environment impacts students comfort, learning, and health. Due to differences related to physiology and ability to influence their environments, children’s thermal comfort needs and even their interpretation of thermal comfort differs from adults. Based on an overview of the current thermal comfort databases, we advocate that there is an urgent need for studies, spread across different climatic regions, examining classroom comfort for young children. The impact of climate change further drives this urgency.