A scoping review of the effects of classroom acoustic conditions on primary school children’s mental wellbeing

Abstract

The aim of this scoping review was to systematically map research on the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on children’s mental wellbeing and identify existing gaps in knowledge to inform future research. This scoping review followed the PRISMA-ScR protocol. A comprehensive search of four online databases (ERIC, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science) was conducted using the search term classroom AND (acoustic* OR noise OR reverb*) AND (“mental health” OR emotion OR wellbeing OR “quality of life” OR anxiety OR depression). Peer-reviewed papers were included if they were written in English, included children in the primary school age range (i.e. 5–12 years), and included a measure of children’s mental wellbeing. Six papers met the criteria to be included in the review. Overall, this review suggests that poor classroom acoustic conditions can negatively affect children’s mental wellbeing. Given the small number of studies, future research suggestions are proposed to fill current gaps in knowledge.

Keywords

Wellbeing quality of life classroom acoustics noise reverberation children

Introduction

Children spend a substantial amount of time in classrooms, with this being one of the main places for learning. Therefore, it is vital to understand how the classroom environment affects children’s mental wellbeing to ensure children feel their best to learn. One facet of the learning environment that needs to be considered is the acoustic environment as it can affect people’s health, comfort, performance, and quality of life.¹ Two acoustic parameters that are important to consider in classrooms are noise and reverberation.

Noise in the classroom can be either external or internal. External noise includes traffic noise, aircraft noise, railway noise, construction noise, and weather noise. Internal noise includes unoccupied noise such as heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system noise and equipment noise. Internal noise also includes occupied noise, such as speech and movement from the children. The effects of noise can be further exacerbated by reverberation. Additionally, room acoustic parameters such as the early decay time (EDT), speech clarity (C50), definition (D50), and the useful-to-detrimental ratio (U50) are also important to consider.

The acoustic conditions of classrooms are often suboptimal—there are several recommendations for classroom acoustic conditions for adequate speech perception,^2–5 however, these are often not achieved.^2,5 This can be due to external noise, internal noise, reverberation, or a combination of these parameters. Regarding external noise, the location of schools, such as being near high traffic noise or under flight paths, can create excessive noise. Regarding internal noise, modern learning environments, and teaching methods involving more collaborative group work have resulted in increased noise levels.^6–9 In terms of reverberation, the reverberation times in classrooms can also be longer than 0.4–0.7 s as recommended in the Australia/New Zealand Standard, the American National Standards Institute Standard, and research papers^2,3,10–12 due to classrooms being built out of sound-reflecting materials. These recommendations are largely based on what is needed for accurate speech perception by supporting the propagation of early reflections and the teacher’s speech in order to reduce vocal effort.^13,14

Poor classroom acoustic conditions can have a negative effect on children’s learning. These effects can be either from acute exposure, or chronic exposure over a long period of time. Poor classroom acoustic conditions can negatively affect children’s speech perception,^3,4,12,15 comprehension (see Lamotte et al.¹⁶ and Schiller¹⁷ for reviews), literacy outcomes (see Mealings¹⁸ for a review), cognition (see Mealings¹⁹ for a review), and physical health (see Mealings²⁰ for a review). These negative effects on the learning processes can affect children’s academic achievement.

In addition to academic achievement, there has been a growing focus on improving children’s wellbeing in the classroom environment with wellbeing now being an important outcome in education. For example, the New South Wales Government in Australia has developed the Wellbeing Framework for Schools as a way of showing their commitment to ensuring that they create quality learning opportunities for children so that they connect, succeed, and thrive.²¹ The NSW Department of Education and Communities adopt a multidimensional nature of wellbeing which includes the domains of cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. Cognitive wellbeing “is associated with achievement and success” (p. 3). Emotional wellbeing “relates to self-awareness and emotional regulation” (p. 3). Social wellbeing “includes the extent to which we experience positive relationships and connectedness to others” (p. 3). Physical wellbeing “is associated with the extent to which we feel physically safe and healthy” (p. 3). Spiritual wellbeing “relates to our sense of meaning and purpose” (p. 3). Similarly, the Department of Education in the United Kingdom has released a document on promoting children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing.²² In this document, the authors outline eight principles of a whole school approach to promoting mental health and wellbeing. These two documents represent the commitment of education departments to improving children’s wellbeing at school and the need to explore how children’s wellbeing can be improved.

The importance of the physical environment and people’s wellbeing has also recently been growing attention in the academic literature. A recent Research Topic on “Acoustics in the Built Environment: A Challenge for Improving the Quality of Life” has been published in the Journal “Frontiers in Built Environment” which demonstrates the need of conducting research in this area given the current lack of knowledge on the topic.¹

Defining exactly what wellbeing is has been a challenge for researchers (see Dodge et al.²³ for a review). For the purpose of this review, we will take the definition proposed by Dodge et al.²³ which has over 2300 citations to date. The authors definition of wellbeing is the following: “stable wellbeing is when individuals have the psychological, social and physical resources they need to meet a particular psychological, social, and/or physical challenge” (p. 230). Wellbeing is represented as a see-saw with psychological, social, and physical resources on one side and psychological, social, and/or physical challenges on the other. If people are faced with greater challenges than the resources they have, the see-saw dips to that side and becomes unbalanced, disrupting their wellbeing. The authors explain that this definition is simple yet precise, is universally applicable, is optimistic by showing that people can improve their wellbeing by increasing resources, and provides a basis for measurement.

Studies investigating the effect of wellbeing on children have shown some interesting links. Greater life satisfaction is positively associated with good physical health, mental health, and relationships in youths.²⁴ Regarding academic achievement, a recent meta-analysis synthesizing 151 effect sizes from 47 studies with a total of 38,946 participants found that the correlation between academic achievement and wellbeing was r = 0.164 and statistically significant.²⁵ This indicates a small to medium relationship between wellbeing and academic achievement with students having higher wellbeing associated with having higher academic achievement. However, it must be emphasized that this is a correlation, so a causation of whether higher wellbeing results in higher academic achievement or higher academic achievement results in higher wellbeing cannot be determined.

Given the growing emphasis in educational environments of supporting positive wellbeing, there is a need to understand how the physical environment of the classroom such as the acoustics affect children’s mental wellbeing as they begin their educational progression in primary school. Therefore, a scoping review was conducted in order to systematically map the research done in this area, as well as to identify any existing gaps in knowledge to inform future research needs in this area. The following research question was formulated: What is known from the literature about the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on primary school children’s mental wellbeing?

Method

Protocol

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR)²⁶ was the protocol used for this scoping review.

Eligibility criteria

To be included in the review, papers needed to include a measure of children’s mental wellbeing taking into account the classroom acoustic environment. Peer-reviewed papers were included if they were written in English, included children in the primary school age range (i.e. 5–12 years), and included a measure of children’s mental wellbeing. No restrictions were made on the publication dates or the type of study (i.e. quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method studies). Papers were excluded if they did not include a measure of emotional or mental wellbeing (e.g. only physical health).

Information sources

To identify potentially relevant documents, the following bibliographic databases were searched: ERIC, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. The final search results were exported into .csv files where duplicates were removed.

Search

The database search was conducted on the 2nd March 2022. The search term used for all databases was classroom AND (acoustic* OR noise OR reverb*) AND (“mental health” OR emotion OR wellbeing OR “quality of life” OR anxiety OR depression).

Selection of sources of evidence

All publications identified in the searches were evaluated by the titles, and then abstracts and full text when needed for potentially relevant publications.

Data charting process

Data from eligible studies were charted to capture the relevant information on key study characteristics and detailed information on all metrics used to measure children’s wellbeing.

Data items

Data was abstracted on the following characteristics: child populations that have been studied, the types of acoustic conditions that have been assessed, the types of measures used to assess wellbeing, and the effect of the acoustic conditions on children’s wellbeing.

Synthesis of results

Studies were grouped by the acoustic conditions explored and summarized according to the types of measures used to assess wellbeing, and the effect of the acoustic conditions on children’s wellbeing.

Results

Selection of sources of evidence

The search and selection process of the six studies to be included in the review is shown in Figure 1. After duplicates were removed, a total of 143 references were identified from searches of electronic databases. Based on the title and/or the abstract and full-text, 137 papers were excluded for the following reasons: 119 did not assess the effect of classroom acoustics on mental wellbeing, 12 did not assess children in the primary school age range, three were not full papers (e.g. conference abstracts or references to full conference proceedings), and three were conference papers with repeated data in a journal article that was included in the selected papers.

Figure 1.

Search strategy and results.

Characteristics and results of sources of evidence

A summary of the characteristics and overall outcomes of the studies included in the review is shown in Table 1 and a synthesis of the results follow.

Table 1.

General information for the six papers included in the review and effect on children’s wellbeing.

Authors	Aim	Population/Age	Acoustic conditions	Wellbeing measure	Effect of louder noise			Effect of longer reverberation time
Authors	Aim	Population/Age	Acoustic conditions	Wellbeing measure	Negative	None	Positive	Negative	None	Positive
Stansfeld et al.²⁷	To assess the effect of aircraft and road traffic noise on children’s cognitive performance and health.	Children aged 9–10 years (n = 2844).	Between-subjects design. Schools with varying exposure to aircraft and road traffic noise (range 30–77 dBA).	Parent rating: Parental version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire.⁴³		x
Wålinder et al.²⁸	To determine whether stress-related symptoms and signs are related to sound levels in the classroom.	Children in Grade 4 (aged 10 years) (n = 57).	Within-subjects design. Classrooms that have varying noise levels over the day (L_eq = 59–87 dBA).	Child assessment: Koppitz’s human figure drawing.⁴⁴		x
Klatte et al.³⁰	To analyze the effects of classroom reverberation on children’s performance and wellbeing.	Children in Grade 1 (n = 89) and Grade 2 (n = 398).	Between-subjects design. Children from classrooms varying in reverberation times (range 0.49–1.11 s).	Child rating: “Fragebogen zur Erfassung emotionaler und sozialer Schulerfahrungen von Grundschulkindern” (Questionnaire on Emotional and Social School Experiences of Elementary School Children (FEESS)⁴⁵				x^a	x^a
Klatte et al.²⁹	To investigate the effects of aircraft noise on cognition and quality of life in children.	Children in Grade 2 (n = 1243).	Between-subjects design. Children from schools varying in aircraft noise levels (L_Aeq,_08–14 = 39.10–58.90 dB).	Parent rating: KINDL-R (Fragebogen zur Erfassung der gesundheitsbezogenen Lebensqualität bei Kindern und Jugendlichen.⁴⁶ Child rating: Five item scale developed for the study.	x
Astolfi et al.³²	To investigate to which extent classroom acoustics affects the perceived wellbeing and noise disturbance in children.	Children in Grade 1 (n = 367).	Between-subjects design. Classrooms that have varying noise levels over the day (L_eq = 38–75 dBA), different reverberation times (T20 = 0.5–1.4 s), different speech clarity (C50 = −2.2–7.6 dB), and different ratio of useful to detrimental energy (U50 = −2.6–4.0 dB).	Child rating: Adapted version of a questionnaire for measuring the wellbeing of young people with special educational needs.⁴⁷	x^b	x^b		x^b	x^b
Polewczyk and Jarosz³¹	To investigate whether and to what extent the acoustic treatment of the school rooms influenced students’ and teachers’ assessment of changes in different aspects of their performance and wellbeing.	Children in Grade 2 to Grade 8 of primary school (n = 378).	Classrooms that have had acoustic treatment installed (reverberation times reduced from 1–2.5 to 0.5–0.8 s).	Teacher rating: Rating of children’s physical and mental aggression via the Acoustic Change Feelings Scale (ACFS-T) (no reference provided). Child rating: ACFS-S (no reference provided).				x

Significant effects for the scales of achievement motivation, relation to the teachers, class atmosphere, and social integration. No effect for the scales of academic self-concept, pleasure of learning, and school attitude.

See Tables 4–11 in Astolfi et al.³² for specific results.

Publication years

The publication years of the six studies included in the review ranged from 2005 to 2020 (2005, 2007, 2010, 2017, 2019, and 2020) demonstrating that this is a relatively new area of research.

Populations

All six studies investigated wellbeing in the range of children typically found in mainstream classrooms. No studies reported specifically looking at children with special educational needs.

Acoustic exposure

All studies examined the effect of chronic rather than acute acoustic exposure on children’s wellbeing (see Table 1). Three studies investigated the effect of noise levels^27–29, three studies examined the effect of reverberation time.^30–32

Measures and methods

Subjective questionnaires were the main data collection method as used by five of the six studies (see Table 1). These were collected from either the child,^29–32 parent,^27,29 or teacher.³¹ One study used drawings from the child.²⁸ Table 2 describes in greater detail the measures and methods used in each of the studies.

Table 2.

Measures and methods used in the six reviewed studies.

Category	Author	Measure	Procedure	Use
Subjective questionnaires	Astolfi et al.³²	Child rating: Adapted version of a questionnaire for measuring the wellbeing of young people with special educational needs.⁴⁸	The questionnaire collects sociodemographic data; an open-ended question asking the child their feeling about their school sound environment; questions on self-esteem, emotional health, relationships at home and with friends, and enjoyment of school, with each question rated as “yes,” “not sure,” or “no”; and an 11-point scale on happiness.	To assess the effect of classroom noise and reverberation on children’s wellbeing.
	Klatte et al.³⁰	Child rating: “Fragebogen zur Erfassung emotionaler und sozialer Schulerfahrungen von Grundschulkindern” (Questionnaire on Emotional and Social School Experiences of Elementary School Children (FEESS).⁴⁶	Children answered yes, correct, or no, not correct on questions across seven scales: social integration (e.g. “My schoolfellows help me when I cannot solve a task”), class atmosphere (“In our class, all children stick together”), relation to the teachers (“My teachers speak with me in a friendly way”), academic self-concept (“I am good at reading”), achievement motivation (“I try to solve even difficult tasks”), pleasure of learning (“I often ask the teacher for additional tasks”), and school attitude (“After the holidays, I look forward to going to school again”).	To assess the effect of classroom reverberation on children’s wellbeing.
	Klatte et al.²⁹	Child rating: Five item scale developed for the study.	The children responded on a four-point pictorial rating scales, ranging from “absolutely false” to “absolutely true” on a five-item scale developed for the study (e.g. “I feel fine in our school”, “I like learning new things at school”). Scale reliability measured by Cronbach’s α was 0.79 for wellbeing.	To assess the effect of aircraft noise on children’s wellbeing.
	Klatte et al.²⁹	Parent rating: KINDL-R (Fragebogen zur Erfassung der gesundheitsbezogenen Lebensqualität bei Kindern und Jugendlichen.⁴⁶	Parents rated child’s wellbeing on a 5-point scale ranging from “never” to “almost always.” The two scales were “mental wellbeing” which consisted of six items (e.g. “During the last 4 weeks, my child was grumpy and bad-tempered”) and “physical well-being” which consisted of three items (e.g. “During the last four weeks, my child suffered from stomach ache or head ache”). Scale reliability measured by Cronbach’s α was 0.77 for physical wellbeing and 0.76 for mental wellbeing.	To assess the effect of aircraft noise on children’s wellbeing.
	Stansfeld et al.²⁷	Parent rating: Parental version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire.⁴³	Parents rated each item as “not true,” “somewhat true,” or “certainly true” on 25 items divided between five scales of five items each. The scales are the hyperactivity scale, emotional symptoms scale, conduct problems scale, peer problems scale, and prosocial scale. It is a validated questionnaire.	To assess the effect of aircraft and road traffic noise on children’s mental health.
	Polewczyk and Jarosz²⁹	Teacher rating: Rating of children’s physical and mental aggression via the Acoustic Change Feelings Scale (ACFS-T) (no reference provided). Child rating: ACFS-S (no reference provided).	The children and teachers rated changes in level of concentration, pace of work, short term memory capacity, fatigue, following simple and complex instructions, task fulfillment, understanding speech communication, and level of aggression among students after acoustic treatment. This scale was developed specifically for this study.	To determine the effect of reducing the classroom reverberation time via acoustic treatment.
Human figure drawings	Wålinder et al.²⁸	Child assessment: Koppitz’s human figure drawing.⁴⁴	The children were asked to “Draw one whole person. You can draw any kind of person you want to draw, but not a stick figure.” These drawings have been used to examine children’s stress (e.g. Sturner et al.⁴⁸). Two trained psychologists assessed the children’s drawings and rated them on a yes or no basis against 28 emotional indicators. The emotional indicators were grouped into categories of impulsivity, insecurity, anxiety, shyness, and aggressiveness.	To assess the effect of classroom noise on children’s wellbeing.

Outcomes

A summary of the overall outcomes of the studies is shown in Table 1. These findings are described further in the following paragraphs categorized by the effect of noise or reverberation on children’s mental wellbeing. While mental wellbeing was the focus of this review, if other aspects of wellbeing were reported in the studies, these were also noted.

Effect of noise

Stansfeld et al.²⁷ found no effects of increased aircraft noise or increased road traffic noise on parent’s report of their child’s health or mental health. The aircraft and road traffic noise levels in the schools the children attended ranged from 30 to 77 dBA.

Similarly, Wålinder et al.²⁸ did not find a significant correlation between emotional indicators from children’s drawings and classroom noise levels with the correlation coefficients ranging from 0.01 to 0.2. However, higher noise levels were associated with increased fatigue and headaches, and reduced cortisol variability indicating a physical stress response even though an emotional response was not found. The noise levels of the classrooms investigated ranged from 59 to 87 dBA.

In contrast, Klatte et al.²⁹ found that less positive parent ratings of children’s physical and mental wellbeing and children’s ratings of wellbeing at school was significantly associated with higher aircraft noise exposure. A 10 dB increase in aircraft noise levels was associated with a decrease of 0.12 points on the physical wellbeing scales, 0.10 points on the mental wellbeing scale, and 0.13 points on the school wellbeing scale. The noise levels in the schools the children attended ranged from 39 to 59 dBA.

Effect of reverberation

Klatte et al.³⁰ found that children from classrooms with long reverberation times judged their achievement motivation, relation to the teachers, class atmosphere, and social integration less positively than children from classrooms with medium and short reverberation times. No difference in ratings were found for the pleasure of learning and school attitude scales, however. The reverberation times in the classroom examined ranged from 0.49 to 1.11 s.

Polewczyk and Jarosz³¹ found that after the installation of acoustic treatment in classrooms which reduced the reverberation times from 1–2.5 to 0.5–0.8 s, there was a reduction in teacher’s perceived level of children’s physical and mental aggression. The authors reported that “prevalence of physical aggression during breaks was rated as “very often” or “often” by 36.4% (before) and 15.9% (after) of teachers” however, the figures that the authors show only have the end points of the scale marked as “always” and “never” so it is hard to interpret these results. Additionally, this decrease of children’s aggressive behavior after acoustic treatment of the classrooms was not confirmed statistically.

Astolfi et al.³² found that 90.8% of children in the study reported to be happy whereas 9.2% who were not happy. Considering all children, only one measure of wellbeing out of 13 showed a significant difference in wellbeing for the children from classrooms with good acoustics (reverberation times of 0.5–0.8 s) compared to bad acoustics (reverberation times of 0.9−1.4 s), with those in classrooms with bad acoustics showing poorer wellbeing. For the children who were happy, there were no significant differences in wellbeing for the children from classrooms with good acoustics compared to bad acoustics. For the children who were unhappy, significant differences in wellbeing for the children from classrooms with good acoustics compared to bad acoustics was found for three out of 13 measures of wellbeing, with those in classrooms with bad acoustics showing poorer wellbeing. Regarding correlation analyses, for children who were happy, there was mixed findings for the correlations of the acoustic parameters and happy children’s wellbeing with most not being significant. For the 9.2% who were not happy, poor classroom acoustic conditions were related to a lower perception of serenity, self-pleasances, and fitting in at school. Unhappy children had poorer judgments on more wellbeing items in the questionnaire in classrooms with bad acoustics compared to classrooms with good acoustics. The range of classroom reverberation times was 0.5–1.4 s and the noise levels ranged from 38 to 75 dBA. The authors suggest that long reverberation times which generate higher noise levels and negatively affect speech intelligibility, result in children perceiving themselves as having less fun and being less happy with themselves. This study does, however, have the limitation that the classrooms with good acoustics were in schools located in richer districts, and had a higher proportion of children instructed in their mother language than the classrooms with bad acoustics.

Discussion

The aim of this scoping review was to determine what is known from the literature about the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on primary school children’s mental wellbeing. After a comprehensive search of four online databases, six papers met the criteria to be included in the review. The results of the studies were analyzed according to the effect of noise and reverberation on children’s wellbeing. This review extends previous reviews on wellbeing by focusing on primary school aged children and including a variety of different acoustic conditions rather than just transportation noise.^33,34

Summary of findings

The findings of the effect of noise on children’s wellbeing revealed no effect for two studies,^27,28 and only a small negative effect for one study.²⁹ This suggests that there may be a small effect of aircraft noise levels on children’s wellbeing, but this needs further research to confirm as Stansfeld et al.²⁷ did not find an effect. Given the limited number of studies and different results, it is hard to quantify what noise level should be the limit to improve children’s wellbeing. Although physical health was not the focus of this review, it is important to note that Wålinder et al.²⁸ did, however, find higher classroom noise levels were associated a physical stress response even though an emotional response was not evident. Klatte et al.²⁹ also found poorer physical wellbeing in children with higher aircraft noise exposure, but Stansfeld et al.²⁷ did not. Therefore, the effects of noise in classrooms (both external and internal) on children’s wellbeing warrants further investigation.

A negative effect of longer reverberation times on children’s wellbeing was found for at least some aspects of wellbeing measured for the studies examining this parameter.^30–32 This suggests that long reverberation times in the classroom can result in children having poorer wellbeing, confirming the importance of making sure that classrooms have acoustic treatment. Astolfi et al.³² reported mixed findings for the correlations of the acoustic parameters and happy children’s wellbeing with most not being significant. However, unhappy children had poorer judgments on more wellbeing items in the questionnaire when they were from classrooms with bad acoustics compared to classrooms with good acoustics. From this result, the authors emphasize the need of having good classroom acoustic conditions to enhance children’s wellbeing at school. From the reverberation times measured by Polewczyk and Jarosz³¹ and Astolfi et al.,³² it appears that reverberation needs to be kept below 0.8 s to help minimize a negative effect on children’s wellbeing.

Future research needs

The heterogeneity of the methodologies and findings, and the fact that only six papers were found examining the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on children’s mental wellbeing, raise many gaps in the literature that would be beneficial to investigate in the future. These include the population of participants involved, the types of acoustic exposure, and the wellbeing assessment.

First, a discussion of the population of participants involved that could be explored. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on primary school children’s wellbeing as primary school is children’s first experience of formal education and is an essential time for children’s academic and psychological development. With the exception of the study by Polewczyk and Jarosz,³¹ the other studies focused on the younger years of primary school. This was particularly the case for the studies by Klatte et al.,³⁰ Klatte et al.,²⁹ and Astolfi et al.,³² who assessed children in Years 1–2. These studies provide interesting and important insights for these younger children, however, it would be beneficial to study children longitudinally to assess if the effect of chronic exposure to noise and/or reverberation worsens wellbeing as children are exposed for longer periods of time. Klatte et al.²⁹ notes that there was only small difference in parent ratings of children’s physical and mental wellbeing and children’s ratings of wellbeing at school for increasing levels of aircraft exposure, but the children in this study were only 8 years old, so they only had a few years of exposure to aircraft noise at school. The results may be different if the children were older and had a longer duration of exposure. Hence, future research assessing the effect of chronic exposure on wellbeing over a longer period of the child’s schooling would be interesting.

Additionally, the population of children studied in the reviewed papers were all children that you would typically find in mainstream classrooms. While this likely would have included children with special educational needs, it is probable that the majority of children involved were typically developing. Therefore, there is a need for future research to specifically explore the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on the wellbeing of children with special educational needs. For example, children with hearing loss are more affected than their typically hearing peers by noise and reverberation when trying to understand speech.¹² This is similar for children who have English as an additional language.³⁵ Therefore, these children might experience reduced wellbeing when in noisy classrooms. Children with autism spectrum disorder have been found to show more repetitive behaviors in higher classroom noise conditions such as repetitive motor movements, repetitive speech, ear covering, hitting, loud vocalizations, blinking, and verbally complaining.³⁶ Therefore, increased noise may also affect the wellbeing of these children. Additionally, hyperactive children have been shown to perform more poorly on mathematics tasks in higher noise conditions.³⁷ This may also result in these children experiencing lower wellbeing in noisier classrooms.

Second, a discussion on the types of acoustic exposures could be explored. In the reviewed papers, one study examined the effect of aircraft noise,²⁹ one study assessed the effect of aircraft and road traffic noise,²⁷ and two studies examined the effect of internal classroom noise.^28,32 Therefore, given these small numbers, future research is needed assessing the impact on different types of noise on children’s wellbeing, especially occupied classroom noise given the amount of time children now spend in group work activities (around 50% of classroom time).^6,7

Additionally, all six studies in the review assessed chronic noise/reverberation exposure naturally occurring in the classroom. Examining the effects of chronic exposure on children’s wellbeing makes sense as we typically think of wellbeing being the state of the person over a period of time. However, it may also be interesting to assess the effect of acute noise and reverberation exposure on children’s immediate wellbeing.

Third, a discussion on the types of wellbeing assessments that could be adopted in future research. As outlined by Dodge et al.,²³ there has been much debate about how to define wellbeing. Dodge et al.²³ have, however, come up with a definition that is simple yet precise, universally applicable, optimistic, and provides a basis for measurement: “stable wellbeing is when individuals have the psychological, social and physical resources they need to meet a particular psychological, social, and/or physical challenge” (p. 230). This definition outlines three facets of wellbeing: psychological, social, and physical. While this review focused on mental wellbeing, many of the reviewed studies used combinations of these three facets in their assessments. Therefore, it would be beneficial to more systematically study the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on each of these facets. Additionally, if needed, they could be broken down further into the aspects described by the NSW Department of Education and Communities (2015) of cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.

Additionally, the type of wellbeing assessment chosen is important. In the reviewed papers, subjective questionnaires were the main data collection method used (in five out of six studies). There are many different measures to assess wellbeing, however. Deighton et al.³⁸ reviewed 11 measures of mental health and wellbeing outcomes in children and adolescence. An additional 15 measures are outlined by Bates and Boren.³⁹ Furthermore, an additional seven measures are reviewed by Waite and Atkinson.⁴⁰ Lists of these measures can be found in Table 3. There are likely to be even more child wellbeing measures on top of these 33, so selection of the measure used in future research and how well it assesses wellbeing at school and the impact of classroom acoustics is important. A new measure that is more specific to the research question of how the acoustic conditions of the child’s classroom may need to be developed if current measures do not suffice.

Table 3.

Child wellbeing measures reported by Deighton et al.,³⁸ Bates and Boren,³⁹ and Waite and Atkinson.⁴⁰

Deighton et al.³⁸	Bates and Boren³⁹	Waite and Atkinson⁴⁰
Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA)	Children’s Hope Scale	Childhood Index (GCI)
Beck Youth Inventories (BYI)	Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS)	KidCOPE
Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC)	Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS)	Kids Coping Scale (KCS)
Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale (BERS)	The Stirling Children’s Well-being Scale (SCWBS)	KINDL-R
Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ)	Me and My Feelings (M&MF)	KIDSCREEN- 27*
Child Symptom Inventories (CSI)	Me and My School Questionnaire (M&MS)	Pictured Child’s Quality of Life Self Questionnaire (PCQoLSQ)
Health of the National Outcome Scale for Children and Adolescents (HoNOSCA)	Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (SSWQ)	Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS)*
Kidscreen	The Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM)	Stirling Children’s Wellbeing Scale (SCWS)*
Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC)	Social Emotional Health Survey-Primary (SEHS-P)	The World Health Organization- Five Well-Being (WHO-5)
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ	The school attitude questionnaire	Warwick and Edinburgh Mental Health Scale (WEMWBS)
Youth Outcome Questionnaire (YOQ)	The PedsQL measurement model
	Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary (SEHS-S)
	The Student Resilience Survey (SRS)
	Holistic Student Assessment (HSA)
	Flourishing at School Survey (FAS)

Repeated measures from previous columns.

A further consideration is what perspective to measure, that is, the child’s, parent’s, or teacher’s perspective. For the reviewed studies, questionnaires were collected from the child only,^30,32 parent only,²⁷ teacher and child,³¹ or child and parent.²⁹ Tobia et al.⁴¹ outline the benefits or taking a multi-informant approach from the child, parent, and teacher. The child provides a self-report while the parental proxy-reports can help understand school-family relationship and in-home support and the teachers’ proxy-reports can help provide information on the child’s behavior and relationships at school.⁴² Therefore, taking a multi-informant approach in future research may be of benefit.

The measures discussed so far has focused on subjective questionnaires which provide quantitative data. Hascher,⁴³ however, describes how the findings from quantitative wellbeing questionnaires can be enriched by qualitative data such as a semi-structured daily emotion diary. Diaries are able to provide greater information and context-specific accounts of emotions experienced in particular situations at school. Additionally, while questionnaires and diaries provide subjective data, the question is raised as to whether any objective data can be gathered. This is possible for physical wellbeing such as measuring cortisol levels, however, at the moment at least it may be more difficult to objectively measure psychological and social wellbeing so subjective measures may need to be relied upon.

Conclusions

This scoping review provided a synthesis of what is known from the literature about the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on primary school children’s mental wellbeing. The results revealed only a small number of studies, but overall demonstrated that increased noise, reverberation, and a combination of both can have a negative effect on children’s wellbeing. Given the small number of studies, however, several gaps in the literature and areas for future research were identified. These included the need for longitudinal studies on how the acoustic conditions of classrooms affect children’s wellbeing over time, an assessment of the effect of classroom acoustic conditions on the wellbeing of children with special educational needs, an examination of the effect on wellbeing of different types of acoustic exposures, and the use of a multi-informant and mixed methods approach on how the acoustic conditions of classroom affect children’s wellbeing.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kiri Mealings

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