Examining the Relationships between Monaural and Binaural Classroom Acoustics Parameters and Student Achievement

Authors

Lauren M. Ronsse, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Lily M. Wang, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Paul L. Sim, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

8-2010

Comments

Published in Proceedings of 20th International Congress on Acoustics, ICA 2010; 23-27 August 2010, Sydney, Australia

Abstract

This study investigates the relationships between several classroom acoustics parameters and student achievement. Detailed binaural room impulse response measurements were conducted in four elementary school classrooms in a midwestern public school system in the United States. Unoccupied background noise levels were also recorded in these spaces. Previous studies have compared how different room acoustics metrics predict speech intelligibility, while another investigation examined perception-based binaural metrics in a typical classroom. This study extends these previous research areas by comparing both binaural classroom acoustics metrics and unoccupied background noise levels to each other and to the standardized student achievement scores of students in the surveyed classrooms. The binaural metrics examined include interaural level differences, interaural cross-correlations, and comparisons of the speech transmission index and frequency-to-frequency fluctuations between the two ears. The results will indi-cate which classroom acoustics parameters, if any, are most strongly related to student achievement.