Health & Medicine
Heavily Decorated Classrooms may Distract Students: Study
Kathleen Lees
First Posted: May 28, 2014 10:43 PM EDT
Teachers often decorate a classroom with colorful art pieces from their students. Yet a recent study conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that rooms with too many decorations or distractions could be detrimental to children's learning.
"Young children spend a lot of time - usually the whole day - in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom's visual environment can affect how much children learn," said Anna V. Fisher, lead author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, via a press release.
For the study, researchers analyzed 24 students from kindergarten who were taught six new science topics in a classroom setting. Three of the classes took place in a heavily decorated classroom, while the others took place in a more sparse school setting.
After testing the children on what they had learned from the classes, those who sat in the sparse room answered 55 percent of the questions correctly, while those in the other group only were correct 42 percent of the time.
"We do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all educational problems. Furthermore, additional research is needed to know what effect the classroom visual environment has on children's attention and learning in real classrooms," Fisher said in the press release. "Therefore, I would suggest that instead of removing all decorations, teachers should consider whether some of their visual displays may be distracting to young children."
More information regarding the study can be seen via the article "Visual Environment, Attention Allocation and Learning in Young Children When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad," via the journal Psychological Science.
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First Posted: May 28, 2014 10:43 PM EDT
Teachers often decorate a classroom with colorful art pieces from their students. Yet a recent study conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that rooms with too many decorations or distractions could be detrimental to children's learning.
"Young children spend a lot of time - usually the whole day - in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom's visual environment can affect how much children learn," said Anna V. Fisher, lead author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, via a press release.
For the study, researchers analyzed 24 students from kindergarten who were taught six new science topics in a classroom setting. Three of the classes took place in a heavily decorated classroom, while the others took place in a more sparse school setting.
After testing the children on what they had learned from the classes, those who sat in the sparse room answered 55 percent of the questions correctly, while those in the other group only were correct 42 percent of the time.
"We do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all educational problems. Furthermore, additional research is needed to know what effect the classroom visual environment has on children's attention and learning in real classrooms," Fisher said in the press release. "Therefore, I would suggest that instead of removing all decorations, teachers should consider whether some of their visual displays may be distracting to young children."
More information regarding the study can be seen via the article "Visual Environment, Attention Allocation and Learning in Young Children When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad," via the journal Psychological Science.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone