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HARVEY, Ill.To decorate her kindergarten classroom for the new school year, Lori
Baker chose cheerful alphabet and number charts featuring smiling children of
different races. In the reading corner, she hung three puffy paper flowers from the
ceiling and posted dancing letters spelling Welcome to Kindergarten.
Otherwise, though, the 20-year teaching veteran exercised restraint and
deliberately left several walls bare in her room at Whittier Elementary School in
Harvey, Ill., a predominately African-American, working-class city about 25 miles
south of Chicago.
This fall, as teachers nationwide prepared their classrooms for the new school year,
many reported being bombarded with a decorations blitz, from educational supply
store promotions to classroom design blogs to Pinterest posts on themed
classrooms with polka dots, owls and bumblebees.
But a recent study has found that for young children, adopting a more subdued
approach, like Bakers, is better. The study, published May 2014 in Psychological
Science, was one of the first to examine how decorations impact learning. It found
that when kindergartners were taught in a highly decorated classroom, they were
more distracted and scored lower on tests than when they were taught in a room
with bare walls.
During the lessons, children sat on carpet squares in a semicircle facing the teacher,
who read aloud from a picture book. They participated in six lessons of five- to
seven-minutes each in which the teacher read aloud on topics such as plate
tectonics, the Solar System and bugs. After each lesson, the children took multiple-
choice picture tests. Lessons were observed and videotaped to monitor how often
the children were focused on the teacher or off task, distracted by themselves,
other students or the visual environment.
In the sparse classroom, the kindergartners got distracted by other students or even
themselves. But in the decorated one, children were more likely to be distracted by
the visual environment and spent far more time off task.
Anna V. Fisher, the studys lead author and an associate psychology professor, said
the findings showed that the classroom environment can be distracting and
negatively impact learning. But, due to the studys small size and controlled setting,
further research is needed.
Fisher and her team at Carnegie Mellon are now observing students in
kindergarten through fourth-grade classes. She suspects that whats on the walls is
less significant in the upper grades because concentration improves as children age.
Older children are also less likely to be placed in highly decorated classrooms.
For Gillian McNamee, director of teacher education at the Erikson Institute in
Chicago, the new study affirms what many educators knew intuitively about
classroom design: Too much visual stimulation can negatively impact learning.
When I walk into a classroom, often they are almost wallpapered with materials
from head to toe. And for an adult, let alone a child, it can make you dizzy and lose
focus, McNamee said.
Some early childhood experts say the study highlights the need for more teacher
guidance on classroom design.
She advises new teachers to be wary of the shopping mall effect in decorating
their rooms. When you go to a shopping mall, after about an hour and a half, its
just too many people, too much visual stimulation, noise, she said. It can wear a
person down.
Kids need environments that are not over-stimulating, especially in preschool and
kindergarten, said Pryor, who has taught little ones for six years. They need
environments that they help to create so that there is a sense of ownership. But
Pryor did confess that she worries about kindergarten parents visiting her class and
not understanding why her classroom is so plain.
All the promotional stuff is more for the teachers and parents than it is for the
kids, she said. Whats on the wall should only be useful and helpful to kids.
Regardless of how they decorate, many kindergarten teachers said they received
little information on classroom design in graduate school and more guidance is
needed.
Baker, the kindergarten teacher in Harvey, recalled buying two big bags of
decorations out of excitement before she began her first year teaching. Her
purchases included a set of bumblebees, each listing a rule such as Be polite and
Be nice. Baker proudly posted the bees on the wall, but at the end of the year, she
realized she had never referred to them. Her thinking on decorations has since
evolved.
Dont buy stuff for your walls unless its something that you are going to use in that
classroom, she said. Otherwise its just taking up space.
Still, Baker said she couldnt imagine teaching in a classroom with bare walls for a
full school day. She said children need some educational displays to engage them.
During the first week of school as Baker was working with a small group, she
noticed a boy reading a number chart she had made counting by 10s to 100. He
whispered quietly to himself, 10, 20, 30, 40
Now, did he learn his numbers by looking at that chart? No, she said. He already
knew them. But he was still noticing things in the environment that he was in, and
thats important.
http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2014/spring/disruptive-decorations.shtml
Disruptive Decorations
Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to adorn 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 abilities to maintain focus during
instruction and 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.
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.
The Institute of Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Education, funded this
research.
Last fall, CMU launched the Simon Initiative to accelerate the use of learning science and
technology to improve student learning. Named to honor the work of the late Nobel Laureate and
CMU Professor Herbert Simon, the initiative will harness CMU's decades of learning data and
research to improve educational outcomes for students everywhere.
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