STUDY SHOWS HEAVILY DECORATED CLASSROOMS DISTRACT STUDENTS

Teachers are continually micromanaged in so many schools. One of administrations' favorite themes often is to mandate that  teachers have elaborate decorations in their classrooms and fancy, detailed bulletin boards. New research shows these mandates are counterproductive.

This is from the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychology researchers Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman of Carnegie Mellon University 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.

I am not at all surprised by these findings.

Class Size Matters Executive Director Leonie Haimson commented on Twitter on the study:

Teachers spend hours decorating their classrooms; not only is it a waste of time but distracts students!

When the Joel Klein-Carmen Farina bulletin board directives came down on us, many of us resisted at Jamaica High School. We told administration that kids couldn't care less about how the classroom is decorated. Our reward if I recall was we didn't get our own classrooms. Nice to see research at the elementary level backs up what I believed was true. I must admit, however,  I was wrong. I didn't think overly decorated rooms led to lower test scores. I just thought it didn't make a difference.

There is so much that is wrong in education that could easily be corrected if the powers that be would occasionally listen to teachers.