High ceilings give low exam results

I suggest Bower, Broadbent, Coussens and Enticott receive an Ig Nobel Prize for their paper "Elevated ceiling heights reduce the cognitive performance of higher-education students during exams". The researchers found the higher the ceiling, the worse students do in exams. This is based on analysis of 15,400  exam results at three Australian campuses over eight years. At first I thought this an April fools day joke, but it seems to be real serious research. The work is deserving of an Ig Noble, recognizing research which has humor, but provokes thought. The key point of the research for me is not that high ceilings disadvantage some students, but that exams do. This can be corrected, I suggest, not by lowering ceilings, but by replacing exams with better assessment techniques.

The research comes at the time when exams should be on their way out. This is  like inventing a more efficient steam engine in the 21st century: an obsolete dangerous technology which no amount of technical improvement can save. Exams cause students stress (I have spent decades avoiding any course which had an exam). That a high ceiling might increase stress is interesting, but I doubt it could be lowered enough to make me comfortable with an exam. I stopped setting exams around the time I stopped giving lectures (2018).

The obvious factor which would cause the effect is the size of the room (bigger rooms having higher ceilings). However, the authors appear to have considered room size as a factor, and controlled for many other possible causes. One not mentioned might be that large rooms may have students from different classes taking tests at the same time, which could make students feel less comfortable.

If this is a real effect it could be easily corrected for by lowering the perceived height of the exam room ceiling. This could be done with lighting.

Reference

Bower, I. S., Broadbent, J., Coussens, S., & Enticott, P. G. (2024). Elevated ceiling heights reduce the cognitive performance of higher-education students during exams. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102367. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102367

Survey Volunteers Needed for Study of Digital Communication and Work Stress in Universities:

E-stress Survey Link

The University of South Australia is leading a study into "Digital Communication and Work Stress in Universities". They are seeking volunteers who work in Australian universities to survey.

This is an excellent initiative, however, they are focusing on those who have a full time working week. Much of the university workforce is part time and casual. These people have been exploited by universities through systematic wage theft, and threatened with loss of work. So I suggest excluding them from studies of work stress will skew the results.

As for how to reduce stress, I suggest courses designed with an asynchronous core, supplemented with online and classroom synchronous events, can help, by lowering student stress and therefore staff stress. With this approach no special arrangements are needed for a campus lock-down, or individual student emergency. The same approach can also be taken to staff meetings, with it not assumed that everyone can turn up on campus at a particular time. I will be touching on this in the webinar "Keep Calm and Carry Online", 20 October from ANU (all welcome).  

Also work stress could be reduced by teaching staff good practices as to how to work online. In response to seeing people waste a lot of time on email, in 1997 I wrote "How to Read and Write E-mail Messages". 

Scaffolded learning, where students do their assignments a bit at a time helps, as do more flexible assessment schemes. One example I have used is "best X out of X+2" assessment in a "Green computing professional education course online". The idea is that students are assessed on their best work, so do not have to worry about doing badly in, or missing, a couple of assessments. This reduces the need for students to ask for special consideration, extra time, and remarking. It also encourages students to work steadily through a course, not leaving everything to the end.