THE EFFECT OF CLASSROOM ACOUSTICS ON STUDENTS’ LEARNING PROCESSES: SELECTION OF OBJECTIVE PARAMETERS AND PROVISION OF A MEASUREMENT PROTOCOL

Since the students’ learning process is affected by classroom acoustics, this work is based on a literature review aiming at identifying the acoustical parameters that have major influence on students’ academic performances. The review strategy involved three different approaches and resulted in more than 30 selected papers, of which only a few provided information on the effects of the acoustics of the environment on learning. The indexes that turned out to have the greater influence on students' performance were therefore considered on the evaluation of acoustical quality in elementary school classrooms through in-field measurements. Room acoustics and intelligibility indices in both occupied and unoccupied conditions of twenty-nine first-grade classrooms belonging to 13 school buildings in Turin that differ in location and typology, were gathered in the study. Then, the association between objective parameters was assessed with linear regression analysis and results of previous studies were confirmed. In addition to that, new important considerations useful for the creation of a simplified protocol that can be universally applied when performing acoustic measurements in classrooms emerged, so that comparisons across several environments can be performed.