For three years I sent my children to a school nicknamed "The Prison," an austere white concrete structure with a forbidding chain-link fence around its roof and a central courtyard packed with school buses pumping out fumes.

We overcame our initial concerns about the building's design because of the school's reputation for high-quality teaching, but I have wondered ever since just how important a school's design is for learning. The architects I spoke to for this column earlier this month ("Thinking outside the white box," March 3) believe it can have a significant effect, and many education experts agree, but it's the space inside the classroom that matters most.

According to recent research by Peter Barrett, a professor at Salford University in England who examines the influence of school design on learning, six factors can help boost a pupil's performance: light, choice, flexibility, connection, complexity and color. Specifically, this includes whether a learning environment has: natural light coming in from more than one direction; open spaces to encourage people to connect and interact; flexible classroom configurations; balanced but not overdone visual displays; ergonomic and student-friendly furnishings; and age-appropriate wall and flooring coloration.