Acoustics and Music

When creating inclusive classroom environments, the acoustics and noise levels of the classroom are factors that need to be considered. While it may seem intuitive, it is important for educators to recognize that noise levels within classrooms can have a detrimental effect on students and their learning. Music is a major part of many student’s lives, and it is increasingly becoming an issue in the classroom. Music can have both positive and negative effects, and it is important that teachers understand the impact it can have on students at school.

Key information & RECOMMENDATIONS

  • “A significant negative relationship has been found between noise levels and learning attainment, cognitive processing, reading, and to a lesser extent, numeracy tasks” (Shield et al., 2010, p. 226).

  • Klatte et al. (2013) carried out a review of literature focusing on the impact of noise in the classroom. Their review pointed to studies consistently showing that children’s speech perception is more significantly impaired than adults’ by unfavorable listening conditions.

  • Students will require an environment with favorable listening conditions to effectively decode and process oral information. According to Klatte et al. (2013) “Non-auditory tasks such as short-term memory, reading and writing are also impaired by noise” (p. 4). Such impairments could result from interference with the student’s perceptual and cognitive processes or from a more general attention capturing process.

  • Though there are some inconsistencies across studies, most evidence demonstrates that environmental noise can affect children’s cognitive development (Klatte et al., 2013). Though these effects are generally shown to be small in magnitude, such long-term effects still need to be taken seriously.

  • Klatte et al. (2013) carried out a review of literature focusing on the impact of noise in the classroom. Childrens’ ability to understand speech under noisy conditions and reverberation continues to improve until their teenage years, meaning that we need to be mindful of classroom acoustics, especially with younger students. A study from Caviola et al. (2021) aimed to gather a stronger understanding of how background noise can impact learning, and more specifically, math achievement. Listening conditions were manipulated within various classrooms of 162 middle school students aged 11-13. Listening conditions included quiet classrooms, classrooms with traffic noises, and classrooms with general classroom noise. The results showed differential negative effects of listening conditions on math achievement related to task difficulty and the age of the students. The youngest children performed best in the quiet classrooms, followed by the traffic noise and the classroom noise conditions, respectively. The detrimental effect of the louder classrooms was not as significant in the older children.

  • Caviola et al. (2021) also found that the higher noise levels had the most detrimental effect with moderately difficult tasks. As tasks became more complex and difficult, the difference in results between the different noise levels became less apparent. Though this seems to be counter-intuitive, it could be explained by the fact that the more complex tasks “implicitly encourages children of any age to actively focus their attention on the task in hand” (Caviola et al., 2021, p. 8). The higher levels of concentration involved with more difficult tasks has been shown to negate some of the potential negative impacts of noise on task performance (Caviola et al., 2021).

  • Noise levels can become an issue with “open plan” classrooms. Shield et al. (2010) showed that these methods can help to ensure that the acoustics of the room don’t become a distraction to those making use of the space and can allow open classrooms to become beneficial, engaging, and flexible learning environments.