The Bare Walls Theory: Do Too Many Classroom Decorations Harm Learning?

NBC:

To decorate her kindergarten classroom for the new school year, Lori Baker chose cheerful alphabet and number charts featuring smiling children of different races. In the reading corner, she hung three puffy paper flowers from the ceiling and posted dancing letters spelling “Welcome to Kindergarten.”

Otherwise, though, the 20-year teaching veteran exercised restraint and deliberately left several walls bare in her room at Whittier Elementary School in Harvey, Ill., a predominately African-American, working-class city about 25 miles south of Chicago.

This fall, as teachers nationwide prepared their classrooms for the new school year, many reported being bombarded with a decorations blitz, from educational supply store promotions to classroom design blogs to Pinterest posts on themed classrooms with polka dots, owls and bumblebees.

But a recent study has found that for young children, adopting a more subdued approach, like Baker’s, is better.The study, published May 2014 in Psychological Science, was one of the first to examine how decorations impact learning. It found that when kindergartners were taught in a highly decorated classroom, they were more distracted and scored lower on tests than when they were taught in a room with bare walls.

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