Evaluation of the association between air pollution and academic performance in school-aged children in Australia

Abstract

Abstract There is increasing international evidence that exposure to air pollutants such as particulate matter less than 2.5 µms in diameter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) may be associated with poorer performance in language and numeracy testing in children. This time-series ecological study evaluated the association between annual ambient PM2.5 and NO2 exposure and school-level National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) scores between 2008 and 2018 in Australia. Annual concentrations of PM2.5 and NO2 were estimated with satellite-based land use regression models. Weighted multipollutant mixed effects models, adjusted for available confounders, were used to evaluate the association between air pollutants and school-level NAPLAN scores. A total of 9268 schools were included in the study. We found that increasing exposure to PM2.5 within a 10 km radius around the school was associated with poorer school-level scores in Reading, Numeracy, Spelling, and Grammar and Punctuation NAPLAN domains for certain grades. Unexpectedly, we found that increasing exposure to NO2 was associated with higher school-level scores in all domains. Our findings for PM2.5 are consistent with previous literature and suggest that associations between PM2.5 and adverse educational outcomes could occur in lower pollution settings. Our findings for NO2 were in the opposite direction to what was expected from prior studies. We posit that these findings may be driven by uncontrolled confounders, such as individual socio-economic factors or exposure misclassification for NO2 which has high spatial variability not captured by our models given NO2 concentrations rapidly decrease away from major high traffic roads. Further exploration of these results is required to understand the association between air pollution and academic performance in this context.