Ears are the doorway to the brain. "Auditory brain development is the foundation of listening, language, and literacy for all children. Language is learned by listening. Literacy depends on language. In order for the brain to develop auditory connections, children’s brains need access to clear auditory information.
Children spend up to 70% of their school day listening to teachers, peers, instructional media, and their own speech. Children cannot listen like adults. Children under the age of 13 have the most difficulty hearing in noise. Adults have a skill called “automatic auditory cognitive closure” that allows them to fill in the gaps if they don’t hear some of the information a speaker is trying to convey. Children haven’t yet learned the information in order to make the inferences and perform automatic auditory cognitive closure.
All children need a quieter environment and a louder signal than adults require. Children are the biggest source of noise in a classroom. The larger the room, the more children, the more simultaneous activities, the noisier the room and the more obscure the desired signal is. There are three main negative effects of poor classroom acoustics: misunderstanding verbal instruction, missing verbal information, and cognitive fatigue.
We can improve children’s hearing/listening by managing the environment. One way to do this is to make the speech signal louder than background noise. Teachers raise their voice in the classroom to overcome background noise. When the voice is raised, vowels get louder but consonants stay weak. Even though the teacher is talking louder, the students are missing a significant amount of information. A better speech-to-noise ratio for children can be achieved by using a classroom amplification system like the Lightspeed Redcat Access". This system typically results in a 42% reduction in off-task behavior and a 72% reduction in teacher re-directions.
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Ears are the doorway to the brain. "Auditory brain development is the foundation of listening, language, and literacy for all children. Language is learned by listening. Literacy depends on language. In order for the brain to develop auditory connections, children’s brains need access to clear auditory information.
Children spend up to 70% of their school day listening to teachers, peers, instructional media, and their own speech. Children cannot listen like adults. Children under the age of 13 have the most difficulty hearing in noise. Adults have a skill called “automatic auditory cognitive closure” that allows them to fill in the gaps if they don’t hear some of the information a speaker is trying to convey. Children haven’t yet learned the information in order to make the inferences and perform automatic auditory cognitive closure.
All children need a quieter environment and a louder signal than adults require. Children are the biggest source of noise in a classroom. The larger the room, the more children, the more simultaneous activities, the noisier the room and the more obscure the desired signal is. There are three main negative effects of poor classroom acoustics: misunderstanding verbal instruction, missing verbal information, and cognitive fatigue.
We can improve children’s hearing/listening by managing the environment. One way to do this is to make the speech signal louder than background noise. Teachers raise their voice in the classroom to overcome background noise. When the voice is raised, vowels get louder but consonants stay weak. Even though the teacher is talking louder, the students are missing a significant amount of information. A better speech-to-noise ratio for children can be achieved by using a classroom amplification system like the Lightspeed Redcat Access". This system typically results in a 42% reduction in off-task behavior and a 72% reduction in teacher re-directions.
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