Architectural Design and The Effects of Daylight on Student Learning
Exerts from the New York Times
"EDUCATION LIFE SUPPLEMENT"
The Feng Shui of Schools By Kate Zernike (NYT)
The Incredible Lightness
Experts agree most on the importance of daylight and windows in the classroom. Consider the results of a 1999 study done for the California Board for Energy Efficiency, which tracked 21,000 students in three school districts in three states.
In Capistrano, Calif., students in classrooms with the most daylight improved 20 percent faster on math tests and 26 percent faster on reading tests over one year than students in classrooms with the least. Moving a child from the classroom with the least daylight to one with the most produced the same improvement as moving that child from the lowest to the highest performing school in the district.
In Seattle, the second of the three districts, the amount of daylight was ''a more potent predictor'' of student performance than sex, class size or whether the student came from a single-parent household, the study found. There and in Fort Collins, Colo., students in classrooms with more daylight had scores 7 to 18 percent higher than those in classrooms without daylight.
The three districts had students with similar backgrounds but different teaching styles, building designs and climates. The consistent results, researchers say, indicate the importance of lighting, no matter what else happens in the classroom.
C. Kenneth Tanner, a professor at the School Design and Planning Laboratory at the University of Georgia, argues that students in windowless classrooms -- built especially in the 1970's as architects tried to make buildings more efficient in heating and cooling -- are experiencing a kind of jet lag because their circadian rhythms are depressed by lack of natural light.
Windows also improve airflow, another critical element in school design. In the California study, students in classrooms with windows that could open progressed about 8 percent faster over one year than those in classrooms with fixed windows, regardless of whether there was air-conditioning. The key, said Jeffery A. Lackney, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that the air completely recirculate one and a half times an hour. Reading comprehension declines as room temperature rises above 74 degrees, he said, and addition and subtraction skills decline when a room becomes warmer than 77 degrees.