Perceptual metrics in elementary classrooms and their correlations to student achievement

Abstract

Binaural impulse response measurements have been made at multiple locations within 20 unoccupied elementary school classrooms in a public school district in Nebraska, USA. Assorted objective metrics have been calculated from these binaural impulse responses, including speech transmission index, distortion of frequency-smoothed magnitude, interaural cross-correlations, and interaural level differences. This presentation highlights the results of these measurements within each classroom and between classrooms. These metrics have been correlated to student scores on standardized achievement tests, obtained as averages for each classroom. One interesting finding is that the distortion of frequency-smoothed magnitude was found to be significantly related to student achievement scores in the language subject areas, even though classroom reverberation times were not, due to the limited range of reverberation times across this investigation.