Naresh Duble, Head-Asia Commercial Excellence & FMD, Armstrong World Industries (India) Pvt Ltd
“Together, we can take a stand to improve the classroom learning experience through acoustic friendly infrastructure solutions. Armstrong is willing to work with academic institutions in this study.”
*Classroom Acoustics – Its effects on the progress of students and wellbeing of teaching staff*
Out of all our five senses, our education system makes maximum use of ears and hence academics should pay heed to accept national building code standards. Case studies in this presentation would help to understand some existing challenges which hamper our pedagogy due to lack of proper acoustics in classrooms.
1) The existence of echo in the classroom hampers speech comprehensibility. In such classrooms, the learning ability of students decreases as their attention span decreases. It is worsened by the fact that they usually shy away from asking questions to clarify misunderstood terms.
2) As students graduate to higher studies, their language lexicon undergoes a tremendous change due to new words being introduced in their academic vocabulary. These new words are often filled with speech consonants. It’s observed that in a non-acoustic friendly classroom, the speech consonants are masked more than the vowels. The loss of consonant information has a great effect on speech recognition
3) Teachers need to talk very loudly in order to make themselves heard in the classroom amidst noise levels. As noise goes up, the teachers’ heart rate goes up which can pose as a danger of myocardial infarction/heart attack thus reducing their life expectancy.
Preliminary tests conducted to understand the acoustic environment of classrooms in India have led to conclusions that the status quo deviates a lot from globally accepted standards and even the new NBC 2016 Codes in India. This is a significant area of concern and needs to be addressed for the success of our academic endeavours. Most of our teachers haven’t been privileged enough to be groomed.
Click here for Upcoming Events: https://bit.ly/2UdkcQ1
Like us on:
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/digitallearningonline/
Follow us on:
Twitter – https://twitter.com/dl_magazine
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/digital_learning_elets/
Connect with us on:
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitallearningmag/
Official Website: http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/
