School environments are connected to children perceptions and emotions. The goal of this research is to explore children subjective perceptions of their school environment using “Q-sort methodology” as a unique method for environmental studies. This paper makes two main contributions. First, the research provides a study design to identify children’s perceptions of school environment that propose new information about what children prefer and can be used in the design of school spaces by designers. Second, it evaluates Q-sort methodology for gathering data directly from children concerning about their perceptions and preferences to clarify their perspectives of the environment based on these objectives. The questions that this paper addresses are: 1- What environmental components in schools do children percieve positively and prefer? And, 2- How can research with children about their place perceptions using Q-sort? According to the purpose of the study, the respondents included 30 children (boys) from the first and second grade of two private primary schools in Kerman. The research, based on q-sort methodology, used interview as a tool for collecting data and discourse analysis for analyzing the data, and exploring the children’s perspectives. The study revealed that children interpreted spaces psychologically and had positive perceptions of and preferences for informal, personal, hiding, cozy, home-like and playground spaces and so on, likely due to affording their psychosocial needs. The result shows that future school designs should explore strategies that use connections of physical and psychosocial characteristics of child's environments to foster positive experience and perceptions.
