The School Year Is Getting Hotter. How Does Heat Affect Student Learning and Well-Being?

“Does heat affect student learning?

Yes, heat makes it harder for students to learn. Students perform worse on tests when they’re hot, according to multiple studies by economists R. Jisung Park and Joshua Goodman, among others.

One study tracked 10 million secondary students who took the PSAT, a standardized exam used to identify students for college scholarships, multiple years between 2001 and 2014. The researchers found that cumulative heat exposure decreases the productivity of instructional time—without school air conditioning, a 1 degree hotter school year reduced that year’s learning by 1 percent.

The effect was three times more damaging for Black and Hispanic students than for white students, that study found. A similar discrepancy was found for students from low-income households compared to their affluent peers.”