University students are likely to encounter mental health issues throughout
their educational journey. Among the various factors that can impact students’
wellbeing, the physical environment can potentially restore cognitive,
physiological, and emotional resources, thereby enhancing academic
performance, and overall quality of life, while reducing feelings of stress and
depression. The Perceived Restorativeness Scale is the most commonly used
tool to assess the level of restorativeness derived from the educational physical
environment. However, a tailored measure could be a more psychometrically
suitable approach to capture the context-specific characteristics of university
environments for academic students. This study aimed to validate an instrument
that can accurately evaluate university spaces to measure the perceived
restorativeness of university students. A total sample of 685 students from two
Italian universities participated in the evaluation of the psychometric properties
of the Restorativeness at University scale (Rest@US), consisting of 13 items
divided into four dimensions: fascination, being-away, scope, and coherence.
The hypothesised four-factor model (being-away, fascination, scope, and
coherence) demonstrated excellent fit indices in both the calibration and
validation samples and was invariant for sex. The scale demonstrates good
reliability. Furthermore, criterion validity has been confirmed, highlighting that,
in a theoretically consistent manner, the perceived restorativeness of university
physical environments from the point of view of students and its dimensions
were negatively correlated with techno-overload and study-related workload
and positively correlated with perceived performance and psycho-physical
wellbeing.