Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Hotter School Days, Less Learning Unless There's AC


Many previous studies have tried to assess the effects of
temperature on learning. Students in hotter countries tend to
score lower on comparable measures of academic achievement than
those in more temperate climates, but there are many differences
across countries, other than average temperature, that are
difficult to hold constant.

In this study, the researchers reviewed the PSAT test scores of
10 million U.S. students from the high school classes of 2001
through 2014, all of whom took the PSAT at least twice. They also
collected or generated data on daily temperatures near schools,
the penetration rate of air conditioning at schools, and many
other demographic, educational, and environmental factors.
Comparing a student's score on the test to the same student's
score one year later allowed them to isolate the impact of
experiencing a hot school year prior to the test.

The key finding is that higher temperatures over the course of a
school year reduce academic achievement. Each additional school
day with a temperature in the 90s, rather than the 60s, reduced
achievement by one-sixth of a percent of a typical year's gain.
If the temperature exceeded 100Γäë, the adverse effect was even
larger. Weekend and summer heat had little impact; the effects
were associated only with higher school-day temperatures. The
study controls for the correlation of heat, air pollution, and
other local economic shocks.

Without air conditioning, each 1Γäë increase in average school year
temperature is associated with a one percent decline in the
amount learned during the school year. For schools with air
conditioning, however, the negative effects virtually disappear.

The researchers note that lower-income and minority students are
more likely to attend schools that are not air conditioned. They
estimate that, for most regions of the United States, investing
in school air conditioning systems leads to sufficiently high
income gains for students in the long-term to out-weigh the costs
of that initial infrastructure investment.

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