Study June 1999

sunlight could perk up kids' grades, store profits

By Carrie Peyton, Bee Staff Writer
Sacramento Bee, 28 juin 1999

Can a few beams of sunshine help lessons soak in?

A new study, one of the largest ever done on natural light in schools, suggests children learn faster and do better on standardized tests in classrooms with more daylight.

Learning rates were 26 percent higher in reading and 20 percent higher in math in rooms with the most natural light, researchers found.

A companion study found that sales were 40 percent higher in stores with skylights, compared with almost identical stores in the same chain without skylights.

Psychologists and energy efficiency experts alike have long suspected that something as simple as sunshine may help people work more efficiently, learn more, call in sick less often and sell more.

The research, conducted by a Fair Oaks energy consulting firm for the state Board for Energy Efficiency and Pacific Gas and Electric Co., is one of the largest and most rigorous attempts to test those suspicions.

"My guess is this will make a huge impact on school design in the next few years," said Arthur Rosenfeld, a senior adviser for energy efficiency for the U.S. Energy Department.

While stressing he hadn't yet read the studies, Rosenfeld described the review team that evaluated them as "a star group," and said their level of certainty is "very, very impressive."

Rosenfeld heads a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council that will be reviewing hundreds of reports on the issue this summer, in an effort to separate hunches from evidence.

"Until fairly recently, the papers just haven't been convincing," he said.

What tidbits there were, were tantalizing.

A Wal-Mart store improved sales in areas lit by skylights, no matter what merchandise it put there. Wal-Mart never released any statistics for researchers to analyze, but within the past year it decided to build all its new stores with more natural light. Costco and HomeBase both have begun designing new stores with skylights, and Target has been studying their effect on energy use and sales.

"In retail there's been much more attention to this because of the economics," said Judith Heerwagen, a Seattle environmental psychologist who helped review the school data gathered by Fair Oaks architect Lisa Heschong.

"It's absolutely intriguing work," Heerwagen said. "Her results were pretty consistent across the sites, which suggests there clearly is something going on here."

The Heschong-Mahone Group brought in statisticians to analyze test scores of more than 21,000 elementary school students in three Western school districts.

In the Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County, where children were tested at the beginning and end of each school year, a comparison of 750 classrooms showed more improvement in those with the most daylight. In those classrooms, students scored 2.3 points higher in reading and 2.5 points higher in math than students in the rooms with the least daylight.

Over the course of the school year, in all lighting situations, the district's students on average increased their scores 8.8 points in reading and 12.5 points in math.

In the Seattle Public School District, where students were tested only once a year, those in rooms with the most daylight had 13 percent higher reading scores and 9 percent higher math scores than those in the least. Similar testing in Fort Collins, Colo., showed 7 percent higher scores in reading and math.

Heschong said she didn't know what might be causing the effect.

"Daylight is a very complex thing. It affects how we see, and it also affects us biochemically in ways that alter alertness", she said.

People also just plain like windows.

"I know I work better when things are open and bright," said teacher Kelly Baker.

She said her fourth-graders seemed more attentive and better focused after they moved from a nearly windowless portable to a bright, newly remodeled classroom at John Holst Elementary School in Fair Oaks.

The workplace preference for windows is so strong that in Europe, "if you're not allowed not to have access to daylight. It's considered inhumane," said Eleanor Lee, a specialist in building technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The new daylight research, detailed in twin reports finalized last week, is "one of the better recent studies that indicates there are effects here worth looking at," said Steve Selkowitz, who coordinated the scholarly review of the findings.

"People have tried to study it on a smaller scale, but doing it on a larger scale with more data sets is important," he said.

Selkowitz, head of the building technologies department of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, cautioned that there is "a complicated set of pathways between a cause and an effect." Virtually everyone, he said, would agree that "the single most important parameter affecting student scores is the teacher."

Steve Looper, a computer teacher at James McKee Elementary in Elk Grove, said he has worked in a range of classrooms and never seen a daylight effect.

"There are a lot of other factors that would improve student performance a whole lot more," he said, such as "getting kids to have enough sleep the night before or to have breakfast in the morning."

Still, those interested in energy savings from the building technique called "daylighting" are expecting more research as fascination with the subject continues to grow.

Interested parties include utilities, which have long advocated buildings that use skylights, well-placed windows, reflecting surfaces and other designs that let people conserve energy by turning off electric lights.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District's light-drenched customer service center saves SMUD the equivalent of about $56,000 US a year in electric bills, an independent study found.

While the energy conserved by daylighting makes a big difference, nationwide, that's not as exciting to builders or building owners as its effects on people inside, said Selkowitz.

"Very generally, if you look at costs in very round numbers, energy costs about $2 US per square foot per year, and people cost about $200 US per square foot in an office building. So even a tiny improvement in productivity or sick time will pay off far more quickly than energy savings," he said.

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