Well-being and noise annoyance outcomes from first graders and relationships with classroom acoustics

The question on the extent to which environmental noise exposure and excessive reverberation affect well-being of children at school is still largely unexplored. Younger children of kindergarten and primary school can suffer more than older pupils of well-being and related mental health issues. Well-being measures are focused on self-esteem, emotional health and resilience, quality of the relationships with friends and family, satisfaction of school, life satisfaction. Noise exposure to traffic noise was demonstrated to be associated with mental health and behavioral problems in children, but nothing has been found until now that relates noise and excessive reverberation at school with well-being and mental health issues, despite the bad acoustic conditions that characterize classrooms in most of Europe. In this study well-being and noise annoyance from different noise sources were investigated with a subjective survey based on validated questionnaires. Twenty first-grade classes of primary schools located in Turin (Italy) participated in the study. Over 367 answered the questionnaire. Classrooms were characterized by different reverberation times and noise exposure. The happiness scale allowed to explore differences between happy and unhappy children. Relationships with good and bad classroom acoustics have also been investigated.