by John P. Eberhard, FAIA
Founding president, Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture

Do you remember when you were a small child—three to five years old—how much you enjoyed playing under the dining room table and pretending it was your castle or special playroom? This sense of “delight” was an experience provided by your brain. Professor Alton J. Delong, at the University of Tennessee, has been studying the relationship of space size to body size in children and has made an interesting discovery: Smaller scale space significantly speeds up a child’s entering into complex play.

When you were a child, your sense of time was different than that of adults. Prof. Delong made the comparison with the “clock on the wall” of children’s “experiential” time in different size spaces. He found that children who are in smaller spaces speed up their sense of “brain” time, that is, they can do more per second of “clock on the wall” time than when they are in a larger space. This longer time allows the child to engage in forms of complex play that may not otherwise be available because the child does not have “enough experiential time” to get into them. It also allows the child to stay in this form of play relatively longer.

This finding from study of the brain and the mind is, like many others, “outside” the normal intuitive design criteria of architects. It is not likely that an architect designing a school is aware that the size of space provided in a classroom is a variable that would affect learning.

Before we discuss this and similar hypotheses developed last year during an Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture workshop on K-6 Classroom Design, let’s explore the concept of a classroom for children.

Architectural settings for children’s learning
Glenn Massengale, PhD, education practice leader for HMC Architects, San Diego, (pictured left) says that classrooms are where children learn as contrasted to incorrectly thinking of classrooms as places for teachers to teach.

Let’s explore how the brain is related to learning. We know something about how the mind is engaged in a “productive learning” experience. Walter J. Freeman, University of California at Berkeley, says: “Our brains don’t take in information from the environment and store it like a camera or a tape recorder, for later retrieval. What we remember is continually being changed by new learning, when the connections between nerve cells in brains are modified.

“A stimulus excites the sensory receptors, so that they send a message to the brain. That input triggers a reaction, by which the brain constructs a pattern of neural activity. The sensory activity that triggered the construction is then washed away, leaving only the construct. That pattern does not ‘represent’ the stimulus. It constitutes the meaning of the stimulus for the person receiving it.

“The meaning is different for every person, because it depends on their past experience. Since the sensory activity is washed away and only the construction is saved, the only knowledge that each of us has is what we construct within our own brains…. Everything each of us knows is created inside our brains.”

We are beginning to know a good deal about how the brain and mind are engaged in the process of learning. What we need to understand is how this process is impacted by the kinds of space in which it occurs. That was the purpose of holding a workshop in San Diego in February, 2005, to explore “K-6 Classroom Design and Neuroscience.” (See a copy of the workshop report under “activities/publications” on the academy’s Web site.)

K-6 classroom workshop premises
1. Brain development between 5–12 years of age is significant and understood. Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists are intrigued with how cognitive capacities change with age. They know that:

• Regions of primary functions (in the brain) mature first (e.g., primary motor cortex)
• Complex/integrative task regions mature later (e.g., temporal lobe)
• The superior temporal cortex, which contains association areas that integrate information from several sensory modalities, matures last.

2. There is an intuitive, but not well documented, understanding that the architectural attributes of classroom spaces affect cognitive (learning) activity.

3. Neuroscience research is likely to provide evidence to support this intuition, including the advantages of classrooms geared to stages in brain development.

4. Therefore, hypotheses are required to provide a research agenda that will bring together interdisciplinary teams to work together in creating the new knowledge needed.

Task Group subjects
We divided workshop participants into six task groups with specific assignments to study an aspect of classroom design and develop testable hypotheses. (Remember, a hypothesis is a statement that seems to be true but requires testing before it can be considered as useable evidence.)

1. Spatial Competence: Spatial competence is basic to daily activities such as putting together lunch, walking to school, fitting large objects into a box of toys, using information presented in maps and diagrams, and understanding verbal descriptions of spaces (e.g., how to find the way to the bathroom). Thus, to understand human cognitive functioning, we must understand how children code the locations of things and navigate around their world, and how they represent and mentally manipulate spatial information. Without at least tolerably close correspondence between internal representations in their brains and the actual physical world, children would not be able to find what they need, avoid what they fear, or imagine and construct tools that they use.

We want to know when and how children acquire spatial-linguistic categories, when and how they acquire the ability to negotiate frames of reference, and when and how they acquire organizational strategies to structure their verbal descriptions of space. It appears that, by six years at least, children have well-organized spatial representations as well as linguistic competence; what they lack, and what they develop between six and eight years, is the ability to analyze what listeners will need to know to be able to follow an efficient route through a space. They need to develop an ability to monitor the comprehension of others and engage in communicative negotiation.
(Reference: Dr. Nora S. Newcombe, Temple University, and Janellen Huttenlocher, the University of Chicago.)

• Hypotheses: Sustained periods of attention (i.e. sustained activity in the brain and reduced stress) will occur if children are provided the opportunity to access private spaces that limit distraction.
• Sustained periods of attention will also occur when learners can locate themselves in an edge space that retains visual contact with the common space.
• If children are provided with a space that is appropriately scaled to their size, the adjusted sense of time and space leads to reduced stress as well as a greater sense of security—and consequently greater competence.

2 Audition—noise and reverberation: Speaking and listening are the primary communications modes in most educational settings. Therefore noise levels and reverberation times of these learning spaces should be such that speech produced by teachers, students, and others is intelligible. Unfortunately, many learning spaces have excessive noise (unwanted sound inside or outside of the room) and reverberation times.

All students and teachers are negatively affected by noise and reverberation. But young students; English language learners; and students and teachers with hearing, language, or learning problems may be at a greater disadvantage. The acoustical properties of classrooms are often the “forgotten variables” in ensuring students’ academic success, particularly for students with unique or communications or educational needs.
(Reference: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2005.)

We know enough about the auditory processes of the brain, to know how a child listens in order to learn to speak, read, spell, and use language to express themselves. It has been estimated that 75 percent of the school day is spent engaged in listening activities. It is easy to understand that to do well in school, a child must be able to receive all auditory signals, and it is wrong to believe that all “normal” children will hear in the same way. There are very large differences among children in what they can receive in the way of auditory messages, depending on how well their brains are prepared to recognize the sounds of speech, how much they understand (previous training), and how well they are able to be attentive to what is being said. A major problem in a typical classroom is that background noise levels tend to mask the words that a teacher is voicing. The teacher’s speech level at the student’s ear gets weaker as the distance between the teacher and the student increases, so that classroom configuration will also affect hearing.

• Hypotheses: Background sounds (e.g., traffic outside or other children inside) affect reading.
• Sounds that are highly repetitive, novel (never heard before), or very “intense” will interfere with cognitive activity.

3. Visual Functions—good stereo-acuity and depth perception: Good visual function at close range, particularly good stereoacuity (the ability to discern 3-dimensional space), is significantly correlated to academic performance. Results suggest that children with attention difficulties have a characteristic inability to restrict visual attention to a limited spatial area so as to process relevant information selectively while effectively ignoring distracting information. Visual factors are significant predictors of academic success as measured by the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.
(Reference: Kulp, M.T., and Schmidt P.P., Ohio State University College of Optometry, Columbus, Ohio, and Maples, W.C. Northeastern State University College of Optometry, Tahlequah, Okla.)

• Hypothesis: Children’s perception of visual images in the classroom (e.g., photographs of famous people, pictures of historic events, or scenes from geographical locations) depends on their prior experiences and consequently are easily misunderstood.

4. Light—attention related difficulties, modulation of alertness: The brain processes light information to visually represent the environment but also to detect changes in ambient light level. The latter information induces non-image-forming responses and exerts powerful effects on physiology such as synchronization of the circadian clock and suppression of melatonin. Light also acutely modulates alertness, but the cerebral correlates of this effect are unknown.
(Reference: Centre de Recherches du Cyclotron (B30), Universite de Liege, Sart Tilman, 4000 Liege, Belgium)

Lighting varies throughout the modern classrooms. Studies suggest that non-natural light is lowest in the front. Inconsistency in the environment in most schools can cause poorer performance on certain tasks by a large population of students. Classroom ergonomic conditions require extensive near work and students with ocular motor dysfunctions may have difficulty meeting the behavioral expectations of the classroom.
(Reference: Ritty JM, Solan HA, Cool SJ. Adirondack Learning Associates, Inc., Plattsburgh, NY.)

• Hypotheses: Because body temperature affects learning capacity, and body temperature changes with the circadian rhythm of children, changing the cycle of interior light to offset natural daylight will improve cognitive performance.
• The following components of “daylight” can elicit brain responses that are positive for learning: the spectral content, the general dosage (total amount of all photons received over a time period), and the special dosage of a coherent wavelength.

5. Color—perception and representation changes with maturation: It cannot reasonably be denied that color matters in our innate perceptions. Some things can be said about color in a psychobiological interpretation. For example, blues and greens are generally regarded as restful. There are many associations with the red as an attention-commanding color: red lights, red flags, etc. It may be that given our predilection for order that degrees of saturation in the various colors we experience provide a confirmation of expectancies. Even though we can analyze our feelings when we are presented with color relationships, such an analysis is fairly obvious, and beyond it there seems to be, at present, no clear chain of reasoning about color from a survival advantage perspective. (Reference: Grant Hildebrand, University of Washington, Seattle.)

Perceived color is based on the relative activity of ganglion cells whose receptive field centers receive input from red, green, and blue cones. It appears that the ganglion cells provide a stream of information to the brain that is involved in the spatial comparison of three opposing processes: light versus dark, red versus green, and blue versus yellow.
(Reference: Neuroscience, Exploring the Brain, by Bear, Connors and Paradiso, second edition, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.)

In addition to emotional associations, factors that affect color perception include the observer's age, mood, and mental health. People who share distinct personal traits often share color perceptions and preferences. For example, schizophrenics have been reported to have abnormal color perception, and very young children learning to distinguish colors usually show a preference for red or orange. Many psychologists believe that analyzing an individual's uses of and responses to color can reveal information about the individual's physiological and psychological condition. It has even been suggested that specific colors can have a therapeutic effect on physical and mental disabilities. (Reference: Encyclopedia Britannica.)

• Hypothesis: The age of a child in the K-6 setting will modify the perception of color and will consequently change color preferences.

6. Wayfinding–understanding and description: After the first few years, developmental changes in spatial representation consist in refinement of a basic system of spatial location. Thus, for instance, although children do not begin to use category prototypes in correcting estimates of location for both dimensions in a two-dimensional encoding situation until after the age of seven years or so, such change simply further reduces variability in estimations that were already centering on the correct location. From this perspective, children’s knowledge of the large-scale environment is likely to be route-based only in circumstances in which the inference necessary to achieve integrated spatial representations is overly taxing. (Reference: Dr. Nora S. Newcombe at Temple University and Janellen Huttenlocher at the University of Chicago.)

• Hypotheses: Landmarks designed around images familiar to children (e.g. animal pictures) can assist in their knowledge of the sequence of landmarks that must be followed to reach a goal.
• The challenge of finding one’s way successfully can increase self-reliance on the part of a child (i.e., is stimulating to the brain) as long as the wayfinding path is able to be comprehended. This varies with the age of the child.

School design and brain maturity
The premise of this workshop—that children’s maturing brains will change their ability to deal with attributes of classrooms—seems reasonable. Clearly, much more is required in the way of research based on neuroscience that can test the range of hypotheses suggested above. It is more likely that new PhD and post-doctoral students in neuroscience will be willing to undertake such research, than are experienced neuroscientists in established laboratories.

ANFA is exploring various possibilities for the funding that will be needed to support PhD and post-doctoral studies designed to explore these hypotheses. If you are associated with an organization that might be willing to support one or more of these studies, please contact us by e-mail to Meredith Banasiak, Meredith@ANFArch.org

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