EDUCATION-FEB10-PG30-31:Page 6 03/02/2010 10:12 Page 30
ICT - Networking and Communications
How much can you learn
with your eyes shut?
T
ake a seat and imagine yourself being taught your favourite lesson
as a child. If you think about it, you can probably imagine the voice
of your teacher without too much difficulty.
Next, imagine a power cut kills the lights: shut your eyes (if they
weren’t closed already) and try again, so that you cannot see your
teacher. Writing on the board goes unnoticed. Arm-waving and
gesticulations for emphasis also pass you by. Demonstrations for
emphasis or entertainment are now pretty irrelevant.
Now, by way of comparison, consider the same scene, but this time
you can see your teacher but you have a bad cold and your blocked
ears mean you cannot hear well.
In which situation can you absorb more information and learn more?
This demonstration helps present the relative importance of sound and
hearing in learning and attainment: specifically, that hearing is hugely
important to the learning experience, yet is generally overlooked.
Ensuring sound and vision in class
Ideally, of course, all students would have full access to sound and vision in
class, but the reality is that a significant proportion of children cannot hear
what they should. This is partly because many children may have some sort of
temporary hearing loss – for example, conditions of the middle ear, such as
glue ear and the effects of colds that lead to that “bunged up feeling” are
the single most common health care problem in children.
In addition, children’s cognitive abilities and capacity to make sense of the
speech they hear is not fully developed. Their speech comprehension is worse
than for adults in comparable circumstances, so speech presented in noise
typically has to be louder for children than for
adults to be heard correctly and understood –
i.e. children require a higher Signal to Noise
The implication is that children have exacting needs when
Ratio (SNR) compared to adults.
listening to - and understanding – speech. These needs are not
Add to this the effects of classroom design
being met by classrooms in the UK.
and acoustics, which can present poor listening
One method of improving listening, SNR, the intelligibility of
conditions for children. In particular, it has been
speech and quality of sound in class is through the use of a
found that a majority of classrooms
Soundfield system. In fact, the importance of sound and hearing in
are likely to be considerably noisier
learning has recently been consolidated in a new report by the
than that stipulated in UK building
independent charity, Deafness Research UK, which reviewed empirical
guidelines, therefore presenting poor
study data to assess Soundfield’s value to normal hearing children in
SNR and listening conditions.
classrooms.
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