The influence of background noise in student achievement.

Abstract

During our entire life span, we spend time in the activity of learning (anything from basic survival skills to highly intellectual processes), but this activity occupies most of the time during the first years of our lives. The classroom becomes then the official learning space that is designed to be conducive to this activity. The learning process, regardless of the task difficulty, is not a mechanical one. It requires a mental process, concentration, and attention in various degrees. Distractions can be detrimental to the learning. Most of the learning activities that occur at school settings require some kind of oral communication (teacher-student or student-student), and these activities call for appropriate room acoustics. In the presence of high levels of background noise, human beings have other resources to better understand the signal of interest. Those can be visual cues, previous knowledge of the topic, or mental ability to “fill in the blanks” in the received speech. The last two are abilities that come with age and experience. The purpose of this study is to better assert the importance of acoustics parameters in the design of classrooms and their relation to student achievement.