New Research Shows That Heavily Decorated Walls Distract Students
Colorful artwork, maps and shapes often cover the walls in a typical elementary school classroom. Are these displays encouraging learning, or could they actually be a distraction? In a new study by Carnegie Mellon, researchers found that busy decorations correlated to distracted behaviors.The research, published in Psychological Science, details how highly decorated classrooms impact children in more ways than one. When exposed to these classrooms, instead of a more bare classroom, children were more likely to spend time off-task, experience smaller learning gains, and be more distracted.
Though children are not usually actively examining the walls, the results are in line with earlier studies on how children are impacted by the physical setup of learning environments. "Young children s...
