A sound foundation? What we know about the impact of environments on learning and the implications for Building Schools for the Future

By P. Woolner, E. Hall, Steven I. Higgins, C. McCaughey, Kate Wall. 2007

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports on a literature review conducted in the UK for the Design Council and CfBT (Higgins et al., 2005) which looked at the evidence of the impact of environments on learning in schools. We have reviewed the available evidence regarding different facets of the physical environment and provided an analysis based on different areas of effect, including the extent to which different facets interact (positively and negatively) with one another. Our conclusions suggest that, although the research often indicates the parameters of an effective environment, there is an overall lack of empirical evidence about the impact of individual elements of the physical environment which might inform school design at a practical level to support student achievement. However, at a secondary level of analysis, there are indications that environmental change can be part of a catalytic process of school development and improvement. The implications of these findings for Building Schools for the Future will be discussed.

Subfields: Education, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Speech and Hearing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83e66370e6341f30403378b9e390c4604cd285c5

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In Education

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

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Citations in the corpus

Lighting and discomfort in the classroom (2009, background): “Some authors place most emphasis on the importance of daylighting, but the need for integrated systems of day- and artificial lighting is broadly accepted (see Woolner, Hall, Higgins, McCaughey, & Wall, 2007 ).”
Learning space preferences of higher education students (2016, background): “Various other learning environment studies endorse the former findings and show that noise and busyness often have a negative impact on student’s behavior [17,38,54-56].”
Pictures are necessary but not sufficient: Using a range of visual methods to engage users about school design (2010, background): “Attempts to assess the impact of physical characteristics of schools and classrooms in isolation tend to lead to confusing, and often contradictory, conclusions ( Woolner et al. 2007a ), yet it seems clear that the physical setting must have some effect on the learning that occurs there.”
Designing Classrooms to Maximize Student Achievement (2014, background): “Evidence suggests that this is not the case (Margolis, Estrella, Goode, Holme, & Nao, 2008; Woolner et al., 2007).”