Lighting and Color: How Educational Facilities Contribute to Student Achievement

Educational facilities play an important role in the way students learn and share knowledge between themselves and other scholars. There are a lot of educational facilities being used by universities and other learning institutions, but for purposes of this discussion, we will focus on lighting and color as discussed in an article at http://www.coe.uga.edu/sdpl/researchabstracts/visual.html published by the University of Georgia College of Education.

Lighting is one of the most critical physical characteristics of educational facilities because this contributes to a classroom's visual environment. A visual environment that is conducive to learning will help students participate in classroom activities more and integrate the concepts and theories being taught. Good lighting significantly contributes to the aesthetics and psychological character of the learning environment. This is because the visual environment affects the following aspects of the learning process:

• visual stimuli
• the student's mental attitude
• as a direct result of the above, the student's scholastic performance

As for color, the choice of what colors to put in a learning space will also have an impact both in the teaching process and how students learn what is being taught. The online article mentions that color can influence student attitudes, behavior and learning through the following:

• a student's attention span
• the student's and teacher's sense of time

The proper combination of colors can help convert an atmosphere that was previously thought of as depressing and monotonous into a pleasing, exciting and stimulating environment. A change in color schemes in schools was even found to reduce absenteeism and enhance positive feelings about schools from students.

Students who saw colors that they liked had influenced their muscular tension and motor control. Warm colors were associated with slight elevations in blood pressure of children while cooler colors tneded to cause slight drops in blood pressure. When colors and lighting are combined together to create educational facilities that are mentally stimulating, they can cause an increase in the following bodily functions:

• muscular tensions
• respiration rate
• heart action
• blood pressure
• brain activity