Abstract
Several studies have shown so far that poor acoustics inside classrooms negatively affects the teaching and learning processes, especially at the lowest grades of education. However, the extent to which noise exposure or excessive reverberation affect well-being of children at school in their early childhood is still unanswered, as well as their awareness of noise disturbance. This work is a pilot study to investigate to which extent classroom acoustics affects the perceived well-being and noise disturbance in first graders. About 330 pupils aged from 6 to 7 years participated in the study. They belonged to 20 classes of 10 primary schools located in Torino (Italy), where room acoustic measurements were performed and where noise level was monitored during classes. The school buildings and the classrooms were balanced between socioeconomic status and acoustic conditions. Trained experimenters administered questionnaires in each class, where pupils answered all together during the last month of the school year (May). Questions included the happiness scale, subscales assessing self-esteem, emotional health, relationship at home and with friends, enjoyment of school, intensity and noise disturbance due to different sound sources, and quality of voice. The findings of the study suggest that long reverberation times, which are associated with poor classroom acoustics as they generate higher noise levels and degraded speech intelligibility, bring pupils to a reduced perception of having fun and being happy with themselves. Furthermore, bad classroom acoustics is also related to an increased perception of noise intensity and disturbance, particularly in the case of traffic noise and noise from adjacent school environments. Finally, happy pupils reported a higher perception of noise disturbance under bad classroom acoustic conditions, whereas unhappy pupils only reported complaints in bad classroom acoustics with respect to the perception of pleasances with himself or herself and of fitting in at school. Being a mother tongue speaker is a characteristic of children that brings more chances of attending classes in good acoustics, of being less disturbed, and of having more well-being, and richer districts presented better acoustic conditions, in turn resulting in richer districts also revealing a greater perception of well-being.
Highlights
According to the (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2014), the physical environment in schools is one of the major elements of health promotion, and among the stressful environmental factors, high levels of noise can cause irritation, encourage aggressiveness, reduce physical and mental performance, and cause discomfort and headaches
Optimal values are shown for speech intelligibility expressed by the parameters C50 and U50, in the classroom with good acoustic (GA), as well as lower values of noise level during group activity, LN_gr, that is strictly related to reverberation time
Apart from the questions Q5_WB and Q6_WB, for which a statistical significant difference has been found between males and females according to the Mann–Whitney U Test (MWU) test, and lower average scores have been gathered by males for both the questions, no difference has been found for the other well-being and noise disturbance aspects
Summary
According to the (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2014), the physical environment in schools is one of the major elements of health promotion, and among the stressful environmental factors, high levels of noise can cause irritation, encourage aggressiveness, reduce physical and mental performance, and cause discomfort and headaches. Research has widely focused so far on the effects that classroom acoustics has on the teaching and learning processes, even at the lowest grades of education, but few studies have investigated the perception of noise disturbance at school and the influence of bad acoustics (BA), i.e., both excessive noise and reverberation, on the pupil’s well-being. No study has investigated, with in-classroom surveys, children wellbeing at school. Another important lack in the literature is the investigation of fundamental aspects of school life at the lowest grade of primary education, i.e., for most of the countries in Europe from 6 to 7 years. Various sensory and cognitive systems interact and adjust functional properties based upon experience and learning (Cardon et al, 2012)
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