S&N-S Light: an innovative educational tool that controls chatting noise levels in classrooms by encouraging pupils to change their behaviour

Pupils talking and moving in a classroom constitute a main source of disturbance during classes, leading to a degraded teaching and learning process. To improve intelligibility under noisy conditions, teachers tend to raise their voice level with possible negative consequences on their vocal health. On the pupils’ side, the exposure to high noise levels decreases their speech processing and understanding abilities, which are directly related to an increase in the perceived annoyance, thus on a general loss of well-being. In this framework, chatting noise may be controlled by directly encouraging pupils to modify their behaviour. Therefore, a patented sound level meter device, namely the S&N-S Light (Speech & Noise Stop-Light), has been used as an educational tool aimed at controlling chatting noise in everyday living environments. S&N-S Light is a light-system based on the variation of a coloured visual feedback according to the increase in the overall sound level. Such device was adopted throughout planned monitorings with two main aims: first, to evaluate its effectiveness as an educational tool in classrooms with pupils (5÷10 years old); second, to investigate whether a game-based challenge is a useful method to reward the motivation and attention of pupils in controlling their voice as a response to the S&N-S Light visual feedback. In-field monitoring was performed in a primary school in Torino (Italy), where five classrooms from first to fifth grade were involved. Preliminary results confirm a decrease of talking noise levels when the visual feedback of S&N-S Light is active compared to its inactive condition. The subjective impression of the teachers provides encouraging outcomes in terms of effectiveness of S&N-S Light as an educational tool. Pupils reported to be interested in monitoring the changes of the coloured visual feedback and increased their responsibility in affecting the learning environment by controlling their voice.