A Slight Increase in Reverberation Time in the Classroom Affects Performance and Behavioral Listening Effort

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a small change in reverberation time (from 0.57 to 0.69 s) in a classroom on children's performance and listening effort. Aiming for ecological listening conditions, the change in reverberation time was combined with the presence or absence of classroom noise. In three academic tasks, the study examined whether the effect of reverberation was modulated by the presence of noise and depended on the children's age.

A total of 302 children (aged 11-13 years, grades 6-8) with normal hearing participated in the study. Three typical tasks of daily classroom activities (speech perception, sentence comprehension, and mental calculation) were administered to groups of children in two listening conditions (quiet and classroom noise). The experiment was conducted inside real classrooms, where reverberation time was controlled. The outcomes considered were task accuracy and response times (RTs), the latter taken as a behavioral proxy for listening effort. Participants were also assessed on reading comprehension and math fluency. To investigate the impact of noise and/or reverberation, these two scores were entered in the statistical model to control for individual child's general academic abilities.

While the longer reverberation time did not significantly affect accuracy or RTs under the quiet condition, it had several effects when in combination with classroom noise, depending on the task measured. A significant drop in accuracy with a longer reverberation time emerged for the speech perception task, but only for the grade 6 children. The effect on accuracy of a longer reverberation time was nonsignificant for sentence comprehension (always at ceiling), and depended on the children's age in the mental calculation task. RTs were longer for moderate than for short reverberation times in the speech perception and sentence comprehension tasks, while there was no significant effect of the different reverberation times on RTs in the mental calculation task.

The results indicate small, but statistically significant, effects of a small change in reverberation time on listening effort as well as accuracy for children aged 11 to 13 performing typical tasks of daily classroom activities. Thus, the results extend previous findings in adults to children as well. The findings also contribute to a better understanding of the practical implications and importance of optimal ranges of reverberation time in classrooms. A comparison with previous studies underscored the importance of early reflections as well as reverberation times in classrooms.