One of this committee’s tasks was to identify avenues of research that represent potentially valuable opportunities to leverage existing knowledge into a better understanding of the relationships between green building technologies in schools and the health and performance of students and teachers. The committee recommended that Future green school guidelines should place greater emphasis on building systems, their interrelationships, and overall performance. Where possible, future guidelines should identify potential interactions between building systems, occupants, and operation and maintenance practices and identify conflicts that will necessitate trade-offs among building features to meet differing objectives.

The committee identified several avenues of research that should be pursued regarding: ” The moisture-resistance and durability of materials used in school construction as well as other properties of these materials such as generation of indoor pollutants and the environmental impacts of producing and disposing of these materials. ” Documenting a full range of costs and benefits associated with providing ventilation rates that exceed the current ASHRAE standard. ” Determining optimum temperature learning, teacher productivity, and buildings.

Ranges to support student occupant comfort in school ” Examining the relationships of exposures from building materials, cleaning products, and cleaning effectiveness to student and teacher health, student learning, or teacher productivity. ” The role of light on learning as well as life-long effects on health in children, particularly with regard to the role that lighting in school environments plays in regulating sleep and wakefulness in children. ” Determining optimum reverberation times that will ensure adequate speech levels without excessive reverberation in classrooms for children of various ages. ” The efficacy, costs, and benefits of alternative ventilation strategies for the dispersion and removal of airborne infectious agents. ” The use of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation in supplemental or portable air cleaning devices in school room applications and its effects on human health. The committee recognizes that additional areas of research could also provide valuable information that could lead to improved indoor environments in schools. However, determining which areas of research may yield the most positive outcomes, and the most valuable information related to school building design, construction, and operations was beyond the resources and scope of this study. The complexity of evaluating the effects of green schools on building occupants, the difficulty of designing research studies that can control for numerous confounding factors, and the difficulty of detecting significant effects has been discussed. As noted in Chapter 2, much of the research conducted to date has focused on one or two building systems and one or two potential outcomes. Much is still not known about the potential interactions of building systems, materials, operation and maintenance practices and their effects on building occupants, in general, or about school environments in particular.

The necessary collaboration between architecture, engineering, science, medicine and social science expertise is a challenge but multidisciplinary research is required to fully study the relationships of indoor environmental quality to human health and performance outcomes. In the following sections, the committee discusses methodologies that could potentially be used for future interdisciplinary research and identifies issues that should be addressed if the evidence base for the effects of green schools on students’ and teachers’ health, student learning, and teacher productivity is to be improved. Learning things is not limited to the scentific area. Instead it also has relations with some other things like speaking a language or using software, including Rosetta Stone Hindi and Rosetta Stone Italian. If you have a creative mind, you will make all your own differences in the end!