Panasonic WX-LT350 Voicing Concern About Noisy Classrooms - Page 1

Voicing Concern About Noisy Classrooms (Summary) Karen L. Anderson Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, pp. 77-79 April, 2001 Background noise and poor acoustics can lead to voice problems for teachers and create unhealthy learning environments; however, solutions such as soundfield amplification can help remedy the problems. Teachers talk on average of 6.3 hours per school day. During most of this time teachers must constantly raise their vocal volume to compete with background noise. This vocal strain leads to teacher absenteeism which in turn leads to financial implications of hiring substitute teachers. Since the majority of classroom education is auditory, it is vitally important that children receive the information clearly. Multiple studies show differences in both performance and behavior between students working in quiet conditions and students working in noisy conditions. Poor listening conditions not only lead to masked properties of speech but also restlessness, decreased attention span, and inappropriate classroom behavior. Additionally, overall stress levels increase and group discussions become ineffective because students are not able to hear the teacher or each other. Students who have hearing problems are even more at risk. 30 - 43% of elementary students have minimal degrees of hearing impairment and 72% of special education students experienced some degree of hearing deficit. An enormous amount of money is spent on hearing technology and learning specialists for these students when research shows that these students could have been learning in a regular classroom if the acoustic conditions had been better. Sound-field amplification systems contribute to a faster learning rate with less repetition of information. Also, teachers do not have to raise their voice to compete with interfering noise. One local agency that implemented sound-field Continued.....