Good acoustics in classrooms will:
- help students and teachers concentrate
- make the teacher’s voice easily reach all students
- make sure that, in group assignments, speech will not spread and disturb others
Face to face teaching and learning
Good acoustics in classrooms will:
- help students and teachers concentrate
- make the teacher’s voice easily reach all students
- make sure that, in group assignments, speech will not spread and disturb others
The most important thing in a classroom is speech clarity - for both teachers and students, both in traditional teaching and in group assignment.
If a classroom has poor acoustics:
- low-frequency sounds will distort speech
- sound will bounce off ceiling and walls and create echoes
- sound levels will escalate
- students and teachers will have to raise their voices to be heard
This will make both teachers and students feel tired and unfocused.
Challenge
- Reducing sound levels.
- Minimising background low-frequency sound.
- Ensuring speech clarity.
- Preventing the build-up of echoes.
- Ensuring speaker and listener comfort.
Solution
- Use a sound-absorbing ceiling with exceptional absorption qualities for all speech frequencies, and particularly low frequencies.
- Add wall absorbers on the back wall for traditional teaching, and on two adjacent walls for group teaching.
- Add a speech-reflecting zone in the ceiling above the teacher for traditional teaching.
Product recommendation
The recommendation above is for this particular activity and space, based on a comparison between the above mentioned Ecophon products. The scale applied ranges from 1 to 5, where 5 is the highest score. For indoor air quality, 5 equates to compliance with French VOC A+ and California Emission Regulation standard, and 4 equates to French VOC A and M1 (The Finnish Emission Classification of Building Material).