The wind is howling outside. Every now and again, the walls shake a little. A thunderstorm is on its way.
What’s the behaviour like in your class? Are pupils quietly getting on with their work, contributing thoughtfully to classroom discussions, and abiding by the class rules? Or are they disruptive and unfocused?
Anecdotally, we know that most teachers would point towards the latter; it’s a commonly held belief that weather affects student behaviour.
In 2020, a Teacher Tapp survey revealed that 51 per cent of classroom teachers believed that wind was the worst kind of weather for student behaviour; 23 per cent believed rain was the worst; 17 per cent believed it was snow; and 7 per cent believed it was hot sunshine.
Just 2 per cent of classroom teachers said the weather didn’t affect student behaviour at all.
But is there scientific research to back up this popular belief?
Evidence suggests there is a link between weather and human behaviour. One study, published in 1979 by Michael Cunningham at the University of Louisville, for example, found that diners in Minnesota were more generous with tipping on sunny days.
Another paper, published in 2006, by behavioural scientist Uri Simonsohn, analysed the impact of the weather on university admission decisions and found that applicants’ academic attributes were weighted more heavily on cloudier days and non-academic attributes on sunnier days. He concluded that changes in cloud cover could increase a candidate’s probability of admission by up to 11.9 per cent.
Other research has linked weather to crime rates. A 2009 investigation by The New York Times found that homicide rates in the city drop significantly on rainy days. And in 2016, the Greater Manchester police published a study which found that crime rises as temperature increases up to 18C.
What about research specifically conducted in schools? There are several small-scale studies to look at here. However, they are mostly decades - or even centuries - old.
For example, in 1989, two researchers from the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the University of Lancaster, Bill Badger and Eric O’Hare, analysed the correlation between the weather and secondary students being sent to the “quiet room” after disruptive behaviour incidents. They found that the speed of the wind was negatively linked, albeit slightly, with disruptive behaviour in the school and concluded that there did appear to be a connection between pupil behaviour across all year groups and changes in temperature over the course of the day.
In another study, in 1990, researchers from the University of Nevada looked at preschool children’s behaviour in relation to weather, and observed children over five weeks in spring. They found that when the weather was fine, stable or moving out of a stable pattern, children interacted with in-class materials more frequently.
However, when the weather was unstable, children tended to engage in more interactions with peers and adults. The authors concluded that, during inclement weather, children may feel uneasy and consequently seek more company.
And in 1997, Carrie Dabb, a professor in the Psychology department at Utah State University, observed preschool pupils for eight weeks between February and March, and rated behaviour on a scale of one to five. These scores were compared with weather phases.
Dabb concluded that behaviour was worse when high-pressure systems weakened in advance of coming low pressure. The best behaviour was when high pressure built again.
More recently, at the University of California, assistant professor Jisung Park has been working with others to analyse the impact exposure to heat has on students - an area that feels particularly relevant given the summer of heatwaves that we have just experienced here in the UK.
In 2018, Park published a paper examining the effect temperature has on exam performance for a million high school students in New York over 15 years - and found it had a substantial effect.
“If you take an exam on a day which is roughly 32C in comparison to a day which is in the low 20s, the performance drops by around 13 per cent of a standard deviation. So a student’s likelihood of passing a given exam drops by around 10 per cent,” he says.
“I estimated that something like 190,000 students, roughly, over this period, who otherwise would have passed their exams, accrued a failing grade because of the idiosyncrasy of the temperature on the day of that exam.”
It’s hard to conclude exactly why this is, he says - although we can speculate.
“It could be that students do not sleep as well the night before, it could be they were more likely to get in some kind of emotionally charged altercation on the way,” he suggests.
Or, he adds, it might have been because the mostly non-air-conditioned schools were just too hot for students to think straight - several studies have found a link between higher temperatures and reduced cognitive function.
“We don’t know. All we can say is that heat, both at home and at school, is a detriment to test performance,” says Park.
Does heat reduce productivity in the classroom?
But what about learning in the longer term? Is that affected as much as a one-off performance in a test on a hot day?
In another study, also published in 2018, Park and others asked if hotter temperatures affect the rate of learning over time.
The researchers linked local daily weather data to test scores of 10 million American students from the high school classes of 2001-14 who took the Preliminary SAT exam multiple times, and found that hotter days in the year prior to the test reduced overall scores, with extreme heat being particularly damaging. There were also larger effects for low-income and ethnic-minority students.
They found that weekend and summer heat had little impact and that the effect could not be explained by pollution or local economic shocks - suggesting heat directly reduces the productivity of learning in the classroom.
“We found that if you have a one degree Celsius hotter than the average school year, this leads to a roughly 2 to 3 per cent reduction in the average learning gains relative to what a student will learn on average in a given year,” Park says. “It’s not a huge effect, but it’s also not a trivial one.”
More research conducted specifically in schools is clearly needed, but what the work of Park and others suggests is that, when it comes to the links between weather, learning and behaviour, it seems that teachers may just have been right all along.
