Noise Control At School- Is It Impacting Our Children’s Education

By Author: Kevin Richard
Total Articles: 238
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Imagine if you were reading a textbook necessary for a specific subject. How would you feel if after every four words, one is completely skipped? Undoubtedly, you would return to the bookstore and ask for a refund!

Still, such issues are basically impacting schools all over the country as students are literally missing words from their teachers in inferiorly designed lecture halls and classrooms. In such scenarios, there is no refund, only social costs that keep on plaguing consecutive batches of the students.

In this post, we will discuss ways in which the design of the educational spaces have gone wrong from an acoustic point of view, and some possible solutions for noise control.

Noise control issues

Though noise control issues can be due to student discipline problems, those are not the only reasons for high noise levels. There are two main acoustic issues in the classrooms. They are:

• Extreme echo

• Extreme noise

These two issues directly interfere with the speech, the most vital ...
... aspect we require to maintain in education. Extreme echo can turn the most minor whispers of students into a mess when they are repeatedly reflected off the walls. This enhances the noise floor of the classroom, and the teacher would have to raise her voice to be heard. The voice of the teacher is also subject to the same echo, causing a considerable loss in speech intelligibility. Even while using a microphone, echo problems can make matters much worse than without a microphone. Extreme noise is generally due to poor isolation between classrooms. Some schools boast open plan classrooms, which are a horrible idea from an acoustic point of view, as undesired noise from a neighboring class can be readily transmitted into another. Noise controlling becomes hard, even if endeavors are made to maintain discipline among students. There are other noise sources, but is generally a blend of extreme noise and echo that causes speech to be unlistenable after long periods of time.

Why is lack of noise control dangerous?

One would think only hearing impaired students require better noise control with sound enclosures. This is not true. Even if a student has no hearing issues, there are many examples where controlling noise in a classroom has a substantial impact on his learning. For instance, younger students don’t have the same amount of contextual knowledge like an older student attending college. Thus, during formative lessons, where vital basics are taught, missing a single word or two can severely impact their progress in learning. The lack of understanding of a younger student is simply because noise control was not applied is a situation to regret about.

Conclusion

This is by no means an extensive list of solutions for noise enclosures in the classrooms. Nonetheless, some of these solutions can be implemented to9 current classrooms to enhance the intelligibility of speech.