How Hot and Cold Climates Shape the Way Children Learn at School

When educators debate the factors that determine how well children learn, the conversation usually revolves around curriculum design, teacher quality, funding, and family background. Rarely does anyone ask a more elemental question: what does the weather outside the classroom window do to the education happening inside it? A new study published in SN Social Sciences by Murat Gürbüz of Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University and Mustafa Sever of Ankara University argues that this question deserves far more attention than it receives. Drawing on the lived experiences of 82 students, teachers, and school administrators in two Turkish provinces with radically different climates, the research documents how temperature, season, and weather patterns quietly but persistently shape the daily practices of educational institutions.

The study is grounded in a long intellectual tradition. Sociologists from Ibn Khaldun to Montesquieu speculated about the relationship between climate and social organization, and modern researchers have built an increasingly rigorous evidence base on the topic. Econometric studies have shown that extreme weather events reduce schooling and educational attainment in settings as varied as Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the global tropics. Research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that heat exposure inhibits learning both internationally and within the United States, with each additional hot school day measurably reducing achievement. Laboratory work in ergonomics has demonstrated that both hot and cold temperature exposure degrade human performance, while building science has documented how classroom air quality and thermal comfort affect students’ subjective perception, physiological responses, and learning outcomes. What has been missing, the Turkish authors contend, is a fine-grained sociological account of how these forces play out inside actual schools, in the words of the people who inhabit them every day.

To fill that gap, Gürbüz and Sever designed a qualitative study using a phenomenological approach, a method that seeks to capture the essence of lived experience rather than to measure variables statistically. They deliberately chose two contrasting provinces. Ağrı, in eastern Turkey, is defined by a cold, continental climate with long, harsh winters in which temperatures routinely plunge far below freezing. Siirt, in the country’s southeast, endures a hot climate in which late spring and summer bring punishing heat. The comparison allowed the researchers to ask whether the same underlying mechanism, the interaction between climate and educational practice, manifests differently under opposite thermal regimes.

The research group comprised 82 participants: 27 students, 27 teachers, and 28 school administrators drawn from schools across both provinces. Participants were selected through maximum diversity sampling, an intentional strategy designed to capture as wide a range of perspectives and circumstances as possible rather than to produce a statistically representative sample. Data collection and analysis followed established interpretative phenomenological procedures, and the study received ethics approval from Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The findings were then organized around three intersecting contexts that the authors identified as the main channels through which climate reaches the classroom: the sociocultural, the economic, and the educational.

The sociocultural channel proved to be among the most striking. In Ağrı, the long winter season reshapes the rhythm of social and family life, and with it the rhythm of schooling. Snow, ice, and extreme cold affect student attendance, complicate journeys to and from school, and restrict outdoor activity during breaks, a problem that connects to broader research showing that season and weather strongly influence physical activity levels. In Siirt, the equivalent disruption arrives with the heat. As air temperatures climb in late spring and summer, the study found that negative effects on educational practices intensified, echoing earlier work in Şanlıurfa, another hot Turkish province, which documented how climate characteristics affect the learning and teaching performance of secondary school students and teachers. In both cases, the climate does not merely make people uncomfortable; it restructures the social conditions under which education takes place.

The economic channel operates through family livelihoods and school resources. Seasonal agricultural labor, a well-documented feature of rural Turkey, pulls children out of school during certain periods of the year, and the timing of that labor is itself dictated by climate. Weather-dependent work patterns shape when families can afford to prioritize schooling and when economic necessity wins. At the institutional level, schools in both provinces were found to be vulnerable to climate impacts and, in the authors’ assessment, weak in terms of climate interaction, meaning that school buildings and routines had not been designed with regional climatic conditions in mind. This vulnerability was most severe in schools constructed without consideration of local climate, where problems multiplied.

The educational channel is the most direct. The study found that hot and cold weather conditions had a more negative impact on educational practices than cloudy, windy, or rainy conditions did. Extreme temperatures interfere with concentration, lesson pacing, the scheduling of the school year, and the physical usability of classrooms and schoolyards. In Ağrı, educational practices were more negatively affected overall, because the extended winter season prolongs exposure to disruptive cold. In Siirt, the damage was concentrated in the hottest months, when overheated classrooms undermine the very conditions learning requires. These findings align closely with the international quantitative literature: a meta-analytic review of temperature and performance found that both heat and cold degrade task performance, and studies of school buildings in cold climates, from Russia to China, have emphasized the importance of thermal design for educational quality.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that climate is not simply a background variable but an active participant in the social institution of education. The authors frame their work within ecological models of human development, in which children’s growth is understood as nested within overlapping environmental systems, from the family to the school to the broader culture and physical environment. Seen through this lens, a snowed-in road or an unventilated classroom is not an inconvenience at the margins of education; it is part of the ecological structure that determines what schooling can actually deliver. The research also resonates with historical evidence: an analysis of school logbooks from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed that extreme weather repeatedly disrupted schooling and exposed social vulnerabilities that persist in different forms today.

The policy implications are straightforward but consequential. The authors recommend that regional climatic conditions be taken into account when establishing educational programs and institutions, in order to safeguard the quality of education. In practice, that means school calendars that reflect local seasonal realities, building codes and architectural standards suited to cold or hot climates, investment in heating, insulation, and ventilation where they are most needed, and curricula and scheduling decisions that anticipate the disruptions that weather reliably brings. As climate change intensifies heat extremes and weather volatility across the globe, the study suggests that educational planners can no longer treat climate as a fixed given. The classrooms of the future, the research implies, will succeed or fail in part on how well societies learn to design education around the atmosphere that surrounds them.

Subject of Research: The interaction between regional climate conditions and educational practices in schools

Article Title: A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate

Article References: Gürbüz, M., & Sever, M. (2026). A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 449. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Keywords: climate, education, sociology of education, qualitative research, phenomenology, school buildings, heat exposure, cold climate, Turkey, student attendance, educational attainment, school policy