Maps,
number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary
classroom walls. However, new research from Carnegie Mellon University shows
that too much of a good thing may end up disrupting attention and learning in
young children.
Published
in Psychological Science, Carnegie Mellon's Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and
Howard Seltman looked at whether classroom displays affected children's ability
to maintain focus during instruction and to learn the lesson content. They
found that children in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, spent
more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning gains than when the
decorations were removed.
"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 Fisher, lead author and associate professor of
psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Should
teachers take down their visual displays based on the findings of this study?
"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 "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. "
For
the study, 24 kindergarten students were placed in laboratory classrooms for
six introductory science lessons on topics they were unfamiliar with. Three
lessons were taught in a heavily decorated classroom, and three lessons were
given in a sparse classroom.
The
results showed that while children learned in both classroom types, they
learned more when the room was not heavily decorated. Specifically, children's
accuracy on the test questions was higher in the sparse classroom(55 percent
correct) than in the decorated classroom(42 percent correct).
"We
were also interested in finding out if the visual displays were removed,
whether the children's attention would shift to another distraction, such as
talking to their peers, and if the total amount of time they were distracted
would remain the same," said Godwin, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and
fellow of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER).
However,
when the researchers tallied all of the time children spent off-task in both
types of classrooms, the rate of off-task behavior was higher in the decorated
classroom (38.6 percent time spent off-task) than in the sparse classroom (28.4
percent time spent off-task).
The
researchers hope these findings lead to further studies into developing
guidelines to help teachers optimally design classrooms.
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