Impact of views to school landscapes on recovery from stress and mental fatigue
Window views to green landscapes help high schoolers recover from attention fatigue and stress.
A randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 94 secondary education students at five different high schools in Illinois. Two of the schools were in urban areas, and the other three in suburban or rural areas. Three classrooms in each of the participating schools were used for the experiment. One classroom had no windows; one classroom had windows with views to a built (manufactured) space; and one classroom had windows to a green space. All of the classrooms had similar layouts.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three classrooms and the student was the only one in the classroom during the experiment other than two examiners who were trained to follow the same experimental procedure. Students were instructed to sit in seats with identical orientation and distances to a window or – in rooms without windows – to the wall. Time in the classroom consisted of a five minute baseline rest period, thirty minutes of moderately stress producing and fatiguing activities using a modified Trier Social Stress Test, and a ten minute break. Questionnaires and attention tests were administered at the end of each time period.
The Visual Analogue Scale (a visual array on which the subject places an X to mark their degree of stress or attentional fatigue) was used after the five minute rest to assess participants’ baseline subjective mental fatigue and perceived stress level. The Digit Span Forward test and the Digit Span Backward test were used twice to assess attentional functioning – once after the classroom activities and again after the break. Physiological measures of stress were administered throughout the experiment by a clinical biofeedback device providing EKG readings, Blood Volume Pulse, Skin Conductance Level, and body temperature. These measures are the most widely employed methods for measuring physiological stress. Levels of chronic stress and chronic mental fatigue and preferred campus landscape were controlled for.
An analysis of the data indicated that classroom views to green space caused significantly better performance on tests of attention and accelerated recovery from stressful events than classroom views on built space or classrooms with no windows. After the break, the attentional capacity of students in the green window view condition had increased 13.12 percent and was 14.33 percent higher than the other two conditions combined. The effect of window view on stress was similar to the change in attentional capacity, but the effect size was smaller. The difference, however, was still significant.
This study also considered the influence of daylight in the classrooms with windows and found no beneficial impact of daylight only. Additionally, this study found that attention restoration and stress recovery are separate pathways influencing students’ psychological and cognitive functioning.
Citation
Li, D., Sullivan, W.C., (2016). Impact of views to school landscapes on recovery from stress and mental fatigue. Landscape and Urban Planning, 148,
