Background Researchers have taken a keen interest in characterizing the acoustic attributes of classrooms and their effects on both students and teachers. Studies have observed and measured the effects of room acoustics on both speech intelligibility and student academic achievement as well as on vocal health of teachers (Hunter and Titze, 2010; Bottalico et al., 2017; Puglisi et al., 2017). In this article, we focus on the impact of classroom acoustics on students.

Initial studies related to classroom acoustics centered on speech intelligibility or the degree to which speech is clear and recognizable. Speech intelligibility, often measured in the form of word, phrase, or sentence recognition, depends on the sound level of the talker, the level of the background noise, and the room acoustic characteristics (Bradley, 1986). When the ratio of the signal level from the talker to the noise level from background sources (signal-to-noise ratio) is low, the speech intelligibility scores of children and those with hearing impairments are consistently found to be worse than for adults or those with normal hearing (Crandell and Smaldino, 2000; Shield and Dockrell, 2003; Klatte et al., 2013).