It's no secret that many schools are not equipped to handle the increasing number of hot days that students and staff experience during the school year due to global climate change. Some 36,000 U.S. schools lack adequate HVAC systemsaccording to an estimate.
In addition to causing extreme discomfort and negative health effects, all this heat is diminishing student performance, researchers say.
Travis Roach, a professor of economics at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Joshua Goodman, a professor of education and economics at Boston University, have separately investigated the relationship between heat and student learning. Their research, and that of others, reveals a compelling relationship between more hot days in the school year and poor student educational outcomes.
Both say that solving this problem is not the sole responsibility of educators and requires more action from policymakers. However, they do offer small steps that educators can take right now to mitigate the impact of heat on their students.
The negative impact of hot schools
To study the impact of heat on schools, Goodman analyzed 10 million students re-took the PSAT examGoodman and the study’s co-authors found that “hotter school days in the years leading up to the test lower scores, with extreme heat being particularly damaging.” The authors were confident in their findings in part because weekend and summer temperatures had little impact on test scores, and the presence of air conditioning appeared to mitigate much of the negative effect.
“Heat not only affects learning in the short term, but also in the long term,” Goodman says. “Hot classrooms during the school year make students appear to have less knowledge a year later or even longer.”
In addition, low-income students are more negatively impacted by the heat. “They tend to be in schools and homes that have fewer resources to mitigate the effects of heat, such as air conditioning,” Goodman says.
Finally, the problem is not limited to American schools. “These patterns are seen in the United States and around the world, so it is a universal phenomenon,” says Goodman.
In a 2020 study looking at students in grades 3-8, Roach found that Every additional day over 100 degrees in the school year decreases student performance. And the link between heat and decreased success was stronger in areas with lower average maximum temperatures.
Roach says many teachers have seen the impact heat can have on learning without necessarily being aware of it. “I've been in the classroom and had a sense that things aren't going well, that they're not working well. And some of that could just be due to environmental issues,” she says.
What teachers can do
Goodman and Roach stress that improving school infrastructure is the primary way to address this problem, and that that is the responsibility of policymakers who control school budgets, not educators. That said, there are some steps educators can take to mitigate the impact of heat.
“Reorganizing annual and daily schedules to try to avoid the hottest times of the year or times of day can be helpful. Small interventions such as electric fans and ice water can also be helpful,” says Goodman.
Roach says teachers should try to be as flexible as their teaching situations allow with high-stakes exams. “Maybe if you’re planning to give an exam on a Wednesday and it’s a particularly hot day, but you know it’s going to be cooler the next day, if you can, give yourself a little bit of flexibility. Your students might do better the next day, for no other reason than it’s a little bit cooler that day and their bodies are under a little bit less stress,” she says.
Roach adds that scheduling breaks for students to cool down can also be helpful, as can simply having teachers be aware that heat may be the reason a particular lesson isn't engaging for students.
Finally, educators can understand that the impact heat may already have on their classrooms is an important part of the ongoing conversation about climate change. “These impacts of climate change are not so far away anymore,” Roach says. “We are feeling them now and we are starting to see them show up in outcomes like test scores and learning.”
