Share of students by school district who said hot days led to hot classrooms. Paradoxically, in hotter areas of the country, hot classrooms were less of a problem, likely because air conditioning was move prevalent. A substantial number of students - about 42 percent - said that on hot days classrooms sometimes or frequently got too hot, though counselors were less likely to say this was an issue. The paper doesn’t have perfect data on whether schools actually have and use air conditioning, but instead relies on surveys of counselors and students. They find, that in fact, it generally did, with most of harmful consequences of heat disappearing in schools that appear to have air conditioning. The study then turns to the question of whether air conditioning prevented the negative effects of heat on learning. Heat during the summer, weekends, and holidays didn’t impact test scores, which is consistent with the idea that learning in school drove the findings. “Such students may also be more likely to attend schools where teachers have better capacity to compensate for lost learning time by adjusting lesson plans or adding more instructional time.” “Wealthier students may be able to compensate for lost learning time by getting additional instruction from their parents or private tutors,” the authors say. Impacts were significantly larger for black and Hispanic students and those in lower-income areas. More days with extreme heat - over 90 or 100 degrees - also caused score drops. Indeed that’s exactly what they find, with every degree increase in average temperature above 60 degrees during the school year, leading to slightly lower PSAT scores. (The College Board administers the PSAT.) To get at that, they look at students who took the test multiple times, and then, accounting for the fact that students generally perform better after taking the test again, they see if students tended to do worse when the exam was preceded by a warmer year. Paper authors Joshua Goodman of Harvard, Michael Hurwitz of the College Board, Jisung Park of UCLA, and Jonathan Smith of Georgia State focus on whether students learn less, as measured by the PSAT, in school years with more hot days. The study, which has not been formally peer-reviewed, relies on extensive data: PSAT data of 10 million students from the high school classes of 2001 to 2014. The research highlights how external factors can impact students’ performance on high-stakes tests, while also suggesting that air conditioning, still missing in many schools, is a worthwhile investment. “On average, a 1 degree Fahrenheit hotter school year prior to the exam lowers scores by … slightly less than 1 percent of a year’s worth of learning.” “Hotter school days in the year prior to the test reduce learning, with extreme heat being particularly damaging and larger effects for low income and minority students,” write the paper’s four researchers. “If it’s really hot … certainly engagement goes down.”Ī new study, released through National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday, shows that after a particularly hot year of school, high schoolers performed worse on the PSAT, an exam taken to prepare for the SAT and determine winners of the National Merit Scholarship. “I really dread school based on the weather, especially in the spring and in the fall,” said one teacher in Baltimore in a school without air conditioning. A warm classroom is not conducive to learning, as any student trying to pay attention to a teacher’s lecture on a hot day can attest.
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