Air pollution worsened students performance on math exams
School leavers performed worse on exams related to thinking and memorization when the air in the immediate vicinity of the school was more polluted. Even small changes in the environment affected academic performance.
Research has identified many factors that affect school performance. For example, children's academic success has been linked to independence, self-esteem and parental education. The development of language skills was unexpectedly positively influenced by physical activity, which teachers made part of the linguistic material: children learned new words better if they were presented during a sports role-playing game based on popular books.
It is also known that external factors, among them the state of the environment, influence academic performance. A new study by specialists from the University of Oulu (Finland) is devoted to this topic. They measured for the first time how different air pollution in the place where the exam is held affects the same skills of the same students over a short period of time. The research paper was published by the journal Economics Letters.
The data was collected from spring 2006 to fall 2016 with the help of Statistics Finland (Statistics Finland). Information about the results of graduation tests was placed in the public domain on the organization's website. The study covered more than 370,000 final exams taken by 172,414 students from 253 schools in 53 cities and districts. The students took several exams in different subjects, so it was possible to look at each student's results in Finnish, physics and mathematics. The tests took place on different days in the same schools. The air quality during the exams was measured every hour near each monitoring point.
The scientists used the number of fine particles (PM2.5, particles smaller than 2.5 microns in size) as an indicator of pollution. Even when the concentration of PM2.5 per cubic meter increased by just one microgram, students performed an average of 0.13% worse on math problems than when the air was less polluted. Linguistic skills, particularly reading and writing, were not affected by air composition. Gender differences made no difference to exam performance.
Researchers were surprised that academic success and, indeed, educational transition could be so strongly influenced by atmospheric pollution. Especially considering that in Finland, where the data was collected, air composition is in line with World Health Organization recommendations. The results of the experiment emphasized how important it is to reduce air pollution even in countries where its levels are not considered critical.