Abstract
UNICEF estimates that 1.6 billion children across the world have had their education impacted by COVID-19 and have attempted to continue their learning at home. With ample evidence showing a negative impact of noise on academic achievement within schools, the current pre-registered study set out to determine what aspects of the home environment might be affecting these students. Adolescents aged 11–18 took part online, with 129 adolescents included after passing a headphone screening task. They filled out a sociodemographic questionnaire, followed by a home environment and noise questionnaire. Participants then completed three executive function tasks (the Flanker, the Backward Digit Span, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) while listening to a soundtrack of either white noise or home-like environmental noise. For purposes of analysis, based on the noise questionnaire, participants were separated into quieter and noisier homes. Results revealed that measures of the home environment significantly correlated with individual perceptions of noise and task performance. In particular, adolescents coming from noisier homes were more likely to report that they studied in a noisy room and that they were annoyed by noise when studying. In terms of noise and task performance, the Flanker task revealed that while older adolescents were more efficient overall than their younger peers, those older adolescents from noisier homes seemed to lose this advantage. Additionally, reaction times for younger adolescents from noisier homes were less impacted by accuracy compared to their peers from quieter homes, though there was no difference for the older adolescents. This evidence suggests that higher in-home noise levels lead to higher rates of annoyance and may be hindering home-learning, with both younger and older adolescents being impacted. Furthermore, the long-term effect of in-home noise on adolescent executive function task performance indicates that these findings transcend the pandemic and would influence in-school learning. Limitations and advantages of online adolescent research without researcher supervision are discussed, including sociodemographics and adapting tasks.
Highlights
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across 188 countries closed their doors to students by April 2020 in order to contain the spread of the virus, leaving approximately 1.6 billion students to continue their education from the safety of their homes1
As overall total income is not very informative when considering the complexity of socioeconomic status, it was decided to report families’ income-toneeds ratio (INR)
Total income was collected in bins, and INR was calculated by using the median of each income bin, to King et al (2020), and dividing this number by the reported total number of inhabitants in the home before the pandemic
Summary
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across 188 countries closed their doors to students by April 2020 in order to contain the spread of the virus, leaving approximately 1.6 billion students to continue their education from the safety of their homes. There is a large body of evidence showing that students’ ability to learn is negatively affected by imposing noise, and that there may be possible longterm cognitive consequences (for an overview see Shield and Dockrell, 2003; Klatte et al, 2013). What, could this mean for learning within the home, an environment that is built to serve various functions and with the potential of having many and different distracting noise sources?
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