Out of the noise: effcts of sound environment on maths performance in middle-school students

The main goal of the present research is to gain a better understanding of the consequences of background noise on learning, with a specific focus on how noise may impair maths achievement. A mental calculation task was administered in the classroom to 162 middle-school students (11 to 13 years old). The listening conditions were manipulated, choosing three different conditions - quiet, traffic and classroom noise - to reflect realistic noise exposure experienced in urban classrooms. A differential negative effect of listening condition on maths performance emerged in relation to task difficulty and children’s age. The youngest children performed better in the quiet and traffic noise conditions than in the classroom noise condition, while in the older children these differences gradually disappeared. The detrimental effect of classroom noise was most evident when the maths task was moderately difficult. With increasing task complexity, the difference between listening conditions faded. These data support the idea that younger children are more susceptible to the detrimental effects of noise in school classrooms than older children, and that their academic attainments are affected. Our findings have implications for classroom learning because different types of environmental noise affected children’s performance differently, depending on the complexity of the task in hand.