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 systems, according to one estimate.
Beyond causing extreme discomfort and negative health impacts, all this heat is decreasing student achievement, say researchers.
Travis Roach, an economics professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Joshua Goodman, an education and economics professor at Boston University, have researched the link between heat and student learning separately. Their research, and that of others, reveals a compelling link between more hot days in the school year and poor educational outcomes for students.
Fixing this problem is beyond educators alone and requires more action from policymakers, both say. However, they do offer small steps 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 looked at 10 million students who retook the PSATs. Goodman and the study’s co-authors found “that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce 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 seemed to mitigate much of the negative effect.
“Heat not only affects learning in the short run but in the long run, too,” Goodman says. “Hot classrooms during the school year make students appear to have less knowledge a year or even more later.”
Also, lower-income students see a bigger negative impact from heat. “[They] tend to be in schools and homes that have fewer resources to mitigate the effects of heat such as AC,” Goodman says.
Finally, the problem is not limited to American schools. “These patterns show up in the U.S. and across the globe, so it's a universal phenomenon,” Goodman says.
In a 2020 study looking at students in grades 3-8, Roach found that each additional day over 100 degrees in the school year decreases student achievement. and the link between heat and decreased success was higher in areas with lower average maximum temperatures.
Roach says that many teachers have seen the impact heat can have on learning without necessarily being aware of it. "I've been in the front of a classroom where it just feels like things aren't quite jiving, they're not going well. And some of that could just be purely environmental,” he says.
What Teachers Can Do
Goodman and Roach both stress that improving school infrastructure is the main way we should address this problem, and 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.
“Rearranging annual and daily schedules to attempt to avoid the hottest times of year or times of day may be helpful. Small interventions like electric fans and ice water can be helpful too,” Goodman says.
Roach says teachers should try to be as flexible as their teaching situations permit with important tests. “Maybe if you're planning on having a test on a Wednesday, and it's an especially hot day, but you know it's going to cool off the next day, if you can, have a little 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,” he says.
Scheduling breaks for students to cool off can also help, Roach adds. As can teachers simply being aware that heat might be the reason a given lesson isn’t resonating with students.
Finally, teachers can understand that the impact heat may already be having on their classrooms is an important part of the ongoing conversation around climate change. “These climate change impacts are not so far off into the distance anymore,” Roach says. “We're feeling them now, and we're starting to see them show up in outcomes like test scores and learning.”
