Purpose: Children’s interaction with the environment considerably influences their growth. To create an environment that guarantees growth and development of children’s skills, children’s characteristics should be considered in selecting facilities, design, and setting of child-related environments. Proper tools should be used to study the compliance of the current design of playrooms in preschool centers with the criteria of user-centered design. The research objective was to design a tool for ergonomic assessment of preschool playrooms with a cooperative approach.
Methods: In this descriptive-analytical research, after reviewing the resources and visiting the place, the preliminary items of the assessment tool were extracted. Afterwards, a 43-item assessment tool was developed through group sessions attended by experts and personnel of preschool centers. The validity of the tool was assessed through content and face validity assessment tests. Reliability of the test was measured by test-retest. The data were analyzed by Excel 2010 and SPSS15.
Results: Research results indicated that 7 of the 43 items had low content validity and needed to be rejected. The calculated content validity index of the final version was 72.9, which was acceptable. During the content validity assessment, minor changes were made to two items. Results of the reliability also showed that this tool is repeatable with ICC=0.99
Conclusion: Considering the research results, the proposed assessment tool is properly efficient in assessing the environment of preschool centers.