Cluttered classroom walls distract children and reduce learning, while intermediate-stimulation orderly classrooms support it¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2019 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Kindergartners in a classroom with decorated, cluttered walls spent more time looking at the walls than the teacher and learned significantly less than in a sparse-walls classroom. → Angeline S. Lillard 2019

Evidence¶

Angeline S. Lillard 2019¶

Angeline S. Lillard. (2019). Shunned and Admired: Montessori, Self-Determination, and a Case for Radical School Reform. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09483-3

q2 · i? · review · r1

The review reports an experimental study (citing Bullard 2013) in which kindergartners received science lessons in a classroom whose walls alternated between cluttered and sparse; "they also learned significantly less" in the cluttered condition, with attention coded during lessons.

"children were distracted by the cluttered walls: They spent more time looking at them than the teacher, and they also learned significantly less"

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Attention — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Classroom Design Affects Learning Progress — a broader claim this one bears on
• Learning Space Redesign Alone Insufficient — related
• Interesting but irrelevant details can impair comprehension and transfer, with effects that vary with the material and the learner — related
• A WestEd research bulletin reports a curriculum revision that replaced a decorative photograph in a math problem with a problem-relevant sketch, on the developers' view that such photographs distract students — related
• Sketching and viewing animations produced the best understanding of a geoscience text, while the photograph condition produced the worst — related