Students’ perceived restorativeness of university environment: the validation of the Rest@U scale

College students may face mental health challenges during their academic pursuits. The physical surroundings play a crucial role in influencing students' overall well-being. Their environment can replenish cognitive, physiological, and emotional resources, leading to improved academic performance, enhanced quality of life, reduced stress and depressive feelings. Restorativeness is the process that an environment can induce to replenish the resources of an individual. According to Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory (ART, Kaplan, 1995), the perceived restorativeness of an environment depends by four factors: fascination; being away; extent and scope. The most commonly used tool is the Perceived Restorativeness Scale to assess the level of restorativeness of a particular physical environment (Hartig and colleagues, 1997). However, this scale has a generic approach to all types of buildings; hence, a customized metric might offer a more psychometrically appropriate method for capturing the context-specific attributes of university settings for academic students. We aimed to contribute to this gap by validating an instrument that can accurately evaluate university environments, in order to measure the perceived restorativeness of university students. We collect data from a sample of 685 students coming from two different Italian universities to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Restorativeness at University Scale (Rest@US). The scale consists of 13 items divided into four different dimensions: Fascination, Being Away, Scope and Coherence. The proposed model with these four factors strongly aligns with the data in both the calibration and validation samples. Importantly, it remains consistent across genders. The overall scale proves reliable, and its validity is supported by evidence. In a manner consistent with theory, students' perceptions of the restorative qualities of university physical environments, as well as their individual aspects, are negatively correlated to techno-overload and study-related workload. Additionally, these perceptions are positively associated with perceived performance and psychophysical wellbeing.