Impacts of classroom acoustics on elementary student achievement

This research investigates relationships between unoccupied classroom acoustical conditions and elementary student achievement. Acoustical measurements were gathered in all of the third and fifth-grade school classrooms (67 total) in a public school district in north-eastern Nebraska, USA. Traditional classroom acoustic parameters, including background noise level and reverberation time, have been correlated to the standardized achievement test scores from students in the surveyed classrooms. Binaural impulse response measurements were also conducted in a subset of the rooms (20 total) and correlated to the student achievement scores. Acoustical metrics calculated from the binaural impulse response measurements include speech transmission index, distortion of frequency-smoothed magnitude, interaural cross-correlations, and interaural level differences. The results from this research indicate that scores on fifth-grade student language and reading subject areas are negatively correlated to higher unoccupied background noise levels. Also, the distortion of frequency-smoothed magnitude, which is a perception-based acoustics metric, was significantly related to the student language achievement test scores.