THE IMPACT OF VISUAL NOISE IN THE CLASSROOM

What is visual noise?

“Visual” noise? Those two words don’t seem to go together, do they? When we think of noise, we usually think of sounds—usually overly loud, distracting sounds. Visual noise is just like that: overly stimulating and distracting. And we often see it in school classrooms.

Most teachers work hard to decorate their classrooms. They use bright, multicolored rugs on the floor and posters on the walls. They cover bulletin boards with cut-outs of various themes that are changed throughout the year. They might even paint scenes on the walls or around the classroom door. They set up bins of supplies throughout the room, such as buckets of crayons and other art supplies, shelves full of learning toys, stands with puppets, and racks full of books. They add brightly colored nametags to desks and label objects and areas around the room with colorful signs. They provide a cheerful place to display good work done by the students. And the result is a bright, colorful, appealing room!

It is also a room that may stifle students’ learning.

Many of the most colorfully decorated and busiest-looking classrooms are preschool and kindergarten rooms. Yet research suggests that too many things in the visual environment of young children can have huge negative impacts on their attention and learning.1 Research has shown the same problem for older elementary and middle-school children. They were found to learn less well in a visually distracting room than in a room with fewer things to look at. This impact became even more pronounced for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.2 Clutter stresses children’s systems and overloads their working memory.

It stands to reason that visual noise would also make paying attention more difficult for students with Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder, who already struggle with distractibility. And students with Sensory Processing Disorder who easily feel overwhelmed by too much visual stimuli may also struggle in a classroom with too much visual noise, leading to behavioral incidents.

How can teachers reduce visual noise and still have appealing-looking classrooms?

Reducing visual noise doesn’t mean that your classroom needs to look boring or cold. Here are some tips that might help:

Keep the front of the room the most clutter free. It is especially important that there are few distractions behind you when you are presenting a lesson.
Don’t keep educational posters on the wall at all times. Instead, bring them out to use as visual aids when teaching the concepts on them, and put them away afterward.
Pick a color scheme of 2-3 colors for the room, and stick with those colors for rugs, furniture, and other items as much as possible.
Shades of blue are generally considered calming for children with neurological disorders, although green and brown can be as well.
Stick with muted hues, although you might be able to have one brighter accent wall. To keep the room from becoming dreary and draining students’ energy, pick lighter shades of the chosen colors, and use white as a contrasting color. White can brighten the room without being visually overstimulating.
Do not utilize bulletin boards purely for decoration. Use them for practical purposes, such as building a word wall or displaying the letters of the alphabet for copying. Keep the number of bulletin boards in the room at a minimum.
Have a plain, portable dividing wall available so that you can block of an area of the room for instruction when students are distracted.
Display student work by keeping pictures of good work in online portfolios that are shared with parents. Alternatively, take pictures of the work and run them as a slide show when children do not need to focus as much, such as during a snack time.
Put students’ nametags on the front of their desks, where teachers and substitutes can see them, rather than on the writing surfaces of their desks.
Avoid rugs with bright colors or a lot of graphics. Here’s an example of a less distracting—but still attractive—rug can be found here:

Cover fluorescent lights with translucent covers if you have any students who receive too much visual stimulation from fluorescent lights. Use natural light as much as possible.
Keep supplies in cupboards or covered with solid-colored fabric when not in use. This will probably do more to reduce visual noise than anything else you do!

Reducing visual noise is important for all classrooms, but especially important for special education classrooms. But don’t worry—with a little creativity, it can be done in a very attractive way as well!

1 Fisher, A. V., Godwin, K. E., & Seltman, H. (2014). Visual environment, attention allocation, and learning in young children when too much of a good thing may be bad. Psychological Science, 25, 1362–1370.
2 Hanley, M., Khairat, M., Taylor, K., Wilson, R., Cole-Fletcher, R., & Riby, D. (2017). Classroom displays-attraction or distraction? Evidence of impact on attention and learning from children with and without autism. Developmental Psychology.