Improving indoor soundscapes in primary school classrooms

Noisy classrooms have always been a concern for students and teachers alike. Primary school students are especially vulnerable to the effects of their sound environment. During this age, students develop linguistic, social, and emotional skills that can be negatively affected by an inadequate sound environment. Visentin et al. conducted a survey to understand the optimal soundscape for a primary school classroom.

While too much noise can obviously hinder learning, the authors found that removing all sources of noise is also harmful to students. Some sounds in the classroom help psychological, cognitive, and social well-being. While outdoor noises, such as traffic, are better eliminated, small anthropogenic sounds created by other classrooms, music, and natural sounds are considered pleasant.

Visentin’s team surveyed primary school students to understand how they perceive their classroom sound environment, including the frequency of internal and external sounds, the loudness of the sonic environment, and the reactions of pleasantness and arousal caused by these sounds.

Given the unique age group of the children surveyed, the team made the questionnaire short and direct, devoting special attention to the wording of the questions and making it accessible.

“We adopted a pictorial scale that uses facial expressions or body reactions to represent in a clear visual manner the emotions elicited by the sound stimuli to assess the students’ reactions to particular sounds,” said author Chiara Visentin.

“Future research on this topic should consider the always-increasing presence of children with special hearing and communication needs in mainstream classrooms,” said Visentin. “We will focus on developing a classroom indoor soundscape model that, both in concept and graphical form, is tailored to primary school students.”

Source: “Indoor soundscape in primary school classrooms,” by Chiara Visentin, Simone Torresin, Matteo Pellegatti, and Nicola Prodi, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0020833 .