Attendance and Daylight

The effects of daylight on the classroom are various. One of them is the study of attendance or absenteeism. A number of studies has been conducted to analyze the relationship between students' attendance rates in classrooms with sufficient daylight and those with insufficient daylight. Schools incorporating natural light show higher student and teacher attendance than schools depend on artificial lighting. A total of 283 students who participated in the study were in five different schools, with an average age of 12.02 years, 148 men and 135 women. Researchers compared attendance rates of students attending different schools to show that there has been a change in student attendance according to the level of natural light. Schools with sufficient natural lighting reported an attendance rate of 3.2 to 3.8 days more per year than those with fluorescent lights (Hathaway, 1992).

In the article (Nicklas & Bailey, 1996), three schools built for the Johnston County School in North Carolina examined the relationship between the use of daylight in classrooms and the academic performance of elementary and middle school students. To investigate students' performance, researchers compared and analyzed the California Achievement Tests results and the End-Of-Grade test results for every school (16 elementary and 8 middle schools) within Johnston County. The authors also used the State of School Systems in North Carolina data from 1995 to analyze student attendance. The study argues that recently built schools without daylight do not guarantee better grades. According to the study's findings, students at daylit schools were able to identify 5 to 14 percent better academic performance than students using artificial lighting. The study also found that students who studied in classrooms with sufficient daylight had about 3 days more attendance per year than other students.