Classroom Study Reveals the Powerful Impact of Strategic Color
What happens to students when you change the colors in the classroom?
“I feel as if the students are more ‘alive’ and work better independently.”
— Ohio teacher, newly painted classroom
I was the color and design expert on a classroom study funded by PPG Paints and reviewed by education researchers at RAND Corporation. Sixteen classrooms were painted with strategic color. Here’s what changed.
Key results
After the strategic color intervention:
- Students reporting happiness increased from 54% → 72%. In unpainted rooms, that number didn’t move.
- Students who said the color helped them learn rose from 48% → 62%. In unpainted rooms, essentially no change.
- Teacher-reported student attention jumped from 63% → 94%.
- Teacher belief that the colors supported learning increased from 50% → 100%.
No new curriculum. No new furniture. Strategic color, chosen and placed with intention.
The teachers changed too
Here we strategically changed only the classroom colors.
Imagine what can happen when we address other design aspects of the classroom as well!
How I did it
In December 2019, I worked with teachers in four elementary schools across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. The study was conducted by Campos, funded by PPG Paints, and reviewed by education researchers at RAND Corporation.
Forty-three third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms took part. Sixteen were painted. The other twenty-seven stayed exactly as they were, so we could compare. Students and teachers in both groups were surveyed before and after. My one heartache in this study was that children in the control classrooms wondered why they couldn’t have classrooms that met their needs too.
This wasn’t a fresh coat of paint. It was strategic color. I worked with each teacher to choose their colors for a purpose, then directed the painters on exactly where each color would go. Every choice was intentional: remove visual noise, support focus, and give the room what that teacher wanted for their students.
Before I was a designer, I spent over five years teaching K-8 art and technology, two subjects that ask very different things of a child’s attention. I knew these rooms from the inside, and I knew what the children in them needed.
The body reads a room before the mind does, and behavior follows the body. So I drew on design principles from neuroscience, neuromarketing, set design, and fine art, even Disney, to decide where the eye should rest, where it should be drawn, and where it should be left quiet. The goal wasn’t decoration. It was a room that helps children settle, focus, and feel that school is a place worth being.
Beyond the classroom
Children aren’t the only ones whose bodies read a room. The same nervous system that settles or scatters in a classroom walks into offices, hospitals, clinics, homes, and hotels every day. Where the eye rests, where it’s drawn, and where it’s left quiet shapes attention and mood everywhere people live and work.
The study measured the effect in classrooms, and young children make it easy to see. They haven’t yet developed the filters we build as we get older, so they show us plainly what a room is doing. Adults feel it too, as the teachers’ results show; we’ve simply normalized the stress of environments that aren’t designed with the body in mind, and learned to override the body’s response.
The principles behind this study, using color to reduce visual noise, direct attention, and support what the people in the space came to do, are the same ones I use in every environment. A classroom is simply one of the clearest places to see them work.
Why this matters
Every school already has walls. Color is a silent resource that is sitting right there, and most schools aren’t using it well. This study is one piece of a growing body of evidence that the rooms where children learn shape how they feel and how they engage.
Please share this with every teacher and administrator you know.
In short
- Strategic color, chosen and placed with intention, made classrooms feel better, the students and teachers perform better in them.
- Students felt happier and more supported in learning; teachers saw calmer, more focused students and felt more energized themselves.
- Classrooms that weren’t painted saw little to no change.