Ever wondered why you underperformed on that final university exam you took in a huge gym or hallway, despite countless hours, days, and weeks of studying? Now you have a real reason: high ceilings.
New research from the University of South Australia and Deakin University has found a link between rooms with high ceilings and poorer exam results.
A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychologyled by Dr Isabella Bower, a UniSA-trained researcher in architecture and psychology, in collaboration with Deakin University Associate Professor Jaclyn Broadbent, a researcher in educational psychology, shows that building design influences our ability to perform tasks.
Dr Bower and her team analysed data from 15,400 undergraduate students between 2011 and 2019 across three Australian university campuses. They compared the students’ exam results with the ceiling height of the room in which they sat the exam.
After studying students' individual differences and their previous performance in courses, they found that students achieved lower than expected scores when taking exams in rooms with raised ceilings.
The researchers took into account the students' age, gender, the period of the year in which the exam was taken and whether they already had experience with exams in the subjects studied.
Dr. Bower says it’s hard to tell whether this is due to the size of the space itself, or factors like student density or poor insulation. These factors in turn lead to fluctuations in temperature and air quality, all of which can affect the brain and body.
“These spaces are often designed for purposes other than exams, for example as a gymnasium, for exhibitions, events and performances,” says Dr Bower.
“The main point is that large rooms with high ceilings seem to disadvantage students. We need to understand what brain mechanisms are involved and whether this affects all students to the same extent.”
The findings support experiments Dr. Bower conducted using virtual reality (VR), which measured the brain activity of participants exposed to different spaces while accounting for other factors such as temperature, lighting and noise.
Using a technique called electroencephalography (EEG), which involves attaching electrodes to the scalp to measure brain cell communication, her team changed the size of chambers while recording the brain’s response. They also measured heart rate, breathing and sweating, to reveal whether a person could subconsciously detect a change in their environment.
In these VR experiments, they found that simply sitting in a larger space resulted in brain activity associated with focusing on a difficult task, leading them to wonder if task performance is impaired in large spaces.
“Based on these results, we wanted to apply our laboratory findings to a real-world dataset and investigate whether people perform worse when they have to concentrate on an important task in a large space, such as a gymnasium,” said Dr. Bower.
“Exams have been a key part of our education system for over 1,300 years, shaping students’ careers and lives,” said Associate Professor Jaclyn Broadbent.
In Australia, many universities and schools are using large indoor spaces for exams to streamline logistics and costs. It is critical to recognise the potential impact of the physical environment on student performance and make the necessary adjustments to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to succeed,” she says.
“These findings enable us to better design the buildings we live and work in so we can perform at our best.”
