Daylighting in schools : a New Zealand perspective

Abstract

In 1999, Heschong Mahone Group (HMG) conducted a study in the United States entitled "Daylighting in Schools" which showed extraordinary results. The HMG results provided proof of a relationship between high quality daylight in classrooms and a 20% improvement in student performance and is one of the most conclusive studies relating daylight and productivity to date. There are now programmes in place in the United States to encourage the use of daylight in schools; often the HMG work is used to provide reasons why daylight should be used. These programmes are having a dramatic effect on the construction of schools across the US (Heschong, 2002a). Following the HMG work, there was still a fundamental question arising out of a lack of understanding of the causal mechanism might be that causes daylight to have an effect of student performance. Is it possible that the HMG results area random occurrence that when replicated by other people in other places will not reproduce the same conclusions? This project replicated the Daylighting in Schools project and methodology in New Zealand - a different educational, socio-economic and financial climate. It addressed the question of the replicabiity of the scientific result produced by HMG and the concerns that have been expressed about the applicability of this 'American data' to New Zealand. The research also examined the potential to use this methodology to understand the causal mechanism. The hypothesis was that the HMG results are generally applicable to schools regardless of the country in which the schools are located. These results suggest that higher rates of learning in classrooms are correlated with high quality daylight rather than with better teachers being allocated to better daylit classrooms. If the hypothesis is demonstrated to be true, that daylight leads to an improvement in tests scores in Maths and English, then the research may have much wider ramifications. The basic Maths and English skills evaluated in primary school learning evaluations are also used every day in offices. Therefore, the results may not just apply to schools, but can also be argued to be more generally applicable. An initial testing phase and a more comprehensive test of the methodology was conducted in a total of 42 classrooms, evaluating the test score improvements of 8 primary students over a 12 month period. The conclusions of this research are: the research methodology can be successfully replicated by another research team, in another economic social and educational framework; 8,000 students in approximately 265+ classrooms in 27 + schools would have to be surveyed for the results of the analysis to be generalisable at a 95% confidence level to all students in schools in New Zealand; it was difficult to find classrooms with really bad daylight scores in the time frame of this project; it is possible that this is because by comparison with the USA schools in the HMG survey, New Zealand has far more windows in its primary school classrooms; the biggest single barrier to completion of a survey of this type is not the time problems of surveying the classrooms, or gathering the anonymous test score data or performing the analysis it is gaining sufficient buy-in from schools to be able to gain 30 minutes access to their students' test scores.