The quality of lighting in school classrooms is absolutely crucial to students’ proper cognitive functioning and academic achievement. This is also confirmed by a new study that presents remarkable results from a primary school in Bratislava, where pupils took three types of psychological tests to monitor cognitive functions such as logical thinking, theoretical numerical reasoning, attention, perception and work pace. The experimental group of students in classrooms with bio-optimised full-spectrum LED lighting showed improvement in all types of tests during the winter months, in contrast to the control group that spent the test period in classrooms with conventional artificial lighting.
Full-spectrum lighting to supplement the lack of daylight in the winter months
At the beginning of the experiment, the students’ performance levels in the control and experimental groups were almost identical. The tests were conducted in the period prior to the lighting installation in October 2022 and then at the end of the school year in May 2023. The so-called CHIPS-test (Children’s problem solving test) measures cognitive development, and its third set of tasks focuses on logical and abstract thinking, which is typical for children over 10 years of age. The Disjunctive reaction time test II (DRT II) is aimed at diagnosing attention and reaction time. The third test, the so-called Structure of intelligence test, and more specifically its numerical unit series (NU), was chosen to evaluate theoretical numerical thinking.
In the experimental group, when comparing the results at the beginning and after the experiment, it was confirmed that prolonged exposure to full-spectrum lighting during the school year plays a significant role in increasing the level of attention and work pace as well as in increasing the level of cognitive development with an emphasis on logical thinking, including abstract problem solving. For the control group students, statistical significance between testing at the beginning and end of the experiment was only confirmed for the DRT II test. During the summer months, there was no need to use artificial lighting in the classrooms and the anticipated improvement was, therefore, expected to primarily be due to the time of year and the abundance of natural daylight.
This test was also chosen to demonstrate the seasonal differences between the tested groups and to highlight the importance of good quality, full-spectrum lighting that mimics the qualities of sunlight, particularly in autumn and winter when natural sunlight is scarce. Pupils in the experimental group with full-spectrum lighting achieved up to 83% of the maximum test scores for focus and work pace in the winter months, compared to less than 30% for the control group with normal lighting. In addition, most of the students in the experimental class, which worked under full-spectrum LED lighting for a year, passed the entrance exam for a bilingual high school, unlike the students in the other classes. The school’s principal confirmed that this is a unique achievement.
Mimicking nature
During the winter months, when daylight is scarce, it is therefore of the utmost importance to ensure that classrooms are sufficiently illuminated with suitable electric light, ideally of a spectral pattern that mimics the light conditions on a sunny day.
Get your Spectrasol INO School luminaires as well.
Mgr. Tereza Ulrichová, Spectrasol
References:
Nosko, ‘The Effect of Bio-Optimised Light in The School Environment on The Cognitive Functions of Pupils’, ASSRJ, vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 236-253, flower. 2024, doi: 10.14738/assrj.115.16943, https://journals.scholarpublishing.org/index.php/ASSRJ/article/view/16943
