The next time you enter a classroom for a test, you might want to choose a seat that has a view of a green landscape. You may do better on the test and be less stressed, according to the results of a recently published study.
Additionally, exposure to the natural environment has been found to be generally beneficial to our health and acts as a restorative influence when we experience tiredness, pressure, anxiety or exasperation.
In this study, Dongying Li and William Sullivan, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Landscape Architecture, found that students with a green view outside their classroom scored higher on tests requiring focused attention and recovered faster from the stress that accompanied these tests.
“It’s a significant finding that if you have a green view outside your window, you’ll do better on tests,” Li said in a press release.
The researchers recruited 94 students from five Illinois high schools to participate in the study. The students were randomly assigned to classrooms of a similar size and with a similar furniture arrangement, but with differences in the configuration of their windows. The rooms ranged from being windowless to having a window that looks out onto a man-made space to having a window with a view of natural green spaces.
Each student was given 30 minutes of activities that consisted of a proofreading exercise, a speech exercise and a mental math assessment. After completion of this stage, they were given a test to measure their attention and a 10 minute break, which was followed by another attention test. During the entire experiment, their heart rate, skin temperature and skin moisture were monitored to measure their stress levels. In addition to this at different points in the experiment the students were administered a questionnaire to assess their mental fatigue.
The results of the study, which will be published in the April 2016 issue of the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, indicate that students in the classroom with a green view scored better by 13 percent on attention tests given after the break. There was no measurable difference between students in the windowless classroom when compared with students in a room with a window overlooking a man-made space.
This study’s findings were related to those of a previous study conducted by Steven Kaplan of the University of Michigan. In this study, which was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Kaplan proposed that mental concentration and fatigue can be improved by observing or being in the presence of nature. He suggested that the brain’s ability to focus on a particular stimulus or task is limited and sometimes results in “directed attention fatigue.” He outlined the idea of Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which proposes that the observation of, or physical immersion in, a natural environment leads to brain function that requires less effort, allowing it to recover from stress and recharge its directed attention capacity.
According to Kaplan, in order to benefit from the recuperative effects of nature, four requirements must be satisfied. They are extent (feeling immersed in the natural environment), being away (receiving an escape from habitual activities), soft fascination (aspects of the environment must capture attention effortlessly) and compatibility (individuals must want to be exposed to and appreciate the environment).
Li and Sullivan’s study found that an exposure to a green view did not have an impact on the subjects’ performance or attention before they took a break. The researchers suspect that this may be due to ART.
When people focus on a task, they must concentrate and their brain must work to exclude all other distractions. This contributes to fatigue and causes them to feel mentally drained. When that person ceases to focus on the task, his or her attention is involuntarily drawn to focus on things that don’t require much effort. ART suggests that this gives the brain a chance to rest and recharge the ability to focus attention again. During the break period, the students with access to a view of a green space have their attention involuntarily drawn outside and the pleasing view likely restores their mental energy, prompting them to perform better on post-break testing than the other two groups.
“When they take their heads out of a book and release their attention, there is a measurable difference in performance for the students who had the green views, but not for the students randomly assigned to the other kinds of classrooms,” Sullivan said.
Similarly, the results of the stress evaluation showed that exposure to views of the natural environment enhanced students’ recovery from stress.
Li and Sullivan hope that their findings will encourage architects and planners to choose sites for new schools that already have trees, vegetation and green views, or to implement new plantings in existing locations. The researchers also hope that lawmakers will change school schedules and implement short breaks to restore students’ attention and allow them time to recover from stress.
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