How the Environment Affects Students’ Learning

By: Jessica Robinson

REED 504: Processes and Acquisition of Reading Skills

Professor Curbeam-Newby

Recently there has been more thought put into how vital a students’ environment is as it relates to their academic success. Both community environment and physical learning environment in schools have a great deal of influence on how the students learn, handle certain situations, perceive things, and overall just how their brain processes things. If either environment is lacking or overly induced with certain factors it could be detrimental to a child’s academic growth. As educators we need to ensure that we are aware of the issues that can occur from environments that are not …show more content…

Now we move into students’ outside environments (home/community), which is the environment that they experience when they are not in school and how it affects their learning. An organism’s interaction with stimuli (environment) is the process of affecting. When one thinks of the word affect they relate it to an emotion or a feeling. Therefore when educator’s think of how the environment affects a students’ learning they too should associate it with emotions, for they have a major influence of how a child learns. Brain researchers have began to study emotions more and it has been found that emotions: constitute a passion for learning, associate learning with either pain or pleasure, help us make meaning out of our learning, work, and lives, push the pursuit of rewarded behavior, improve social problem solving, etc. Students who are anxious, angry, or depressed don’t learn. When students are caught in these emotional states they do not take in information efficiently or deal with it well. All emotional events receive first class treatment when it comes to processing of the brain. With that being said a child has to deal with their emotions first before they can even think about learning. Everything we experience in life has some type of emotional tone to it. Lawson (2002) Emotions are the feelings that color our lives and allow us to experience all of the joys and sorrows. They arise from memories and reactions to current