Individual Differences in Dealing With Classroom Noise Disturbances

Classrooms are noisy: when children are engaged in solo work, they also hear background babble, noise from outdoor, and people moving around. Few studies investigating the effects of noise on academic tasks use naturalistic stimuli. Questions also remain regarding why some children are more impaired by noise than others. This study compared primary school children’s performance at three academic tasks (text recall, reading comprehension, mathematics) in silence, and while hearing irrelevant verbal noise (storytelling, n = 33) or mixed noise (outdoor noise, movement, babble, n = 31). We found that noise does not impair overall performance. Children might use compensatory strategies (e.g., re-reading) to reach the same level of performance in silence and noise. Individual differences in selective attention and working memory were not related to the impact of noise, with one exception: children with lower working memory were more impaired by noise when doing mathematics. Replication on a larger sample is needed. Classrooms are full of life and full of sounds, generated by discussions, movements, objects, and events occurring outdoors (e.g., road traffic). As far as instruction is concerned, any sound that is not related to the current learning objectives and is unwanted, nonmeaningful, distracting, and/or unpleasant can be defined as a noise. This study investigated (1) to what extent noise impacts on children’s performance on academic tasks and (2) potential individual differences in children’s performance when working with background noise, compared to silence. 1Institute of Education, University College London 2Birkbeck, University of London Address correspondence to Jessica Massonnié, School of Education and Sociology, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Portsmouth, St George’s Building, 141 High Street, Portsmouth PO1 2HY, United Kingdom; e-mail: jessica.massonnie@port.ac.uk According to current theories, noise can impact task performance via three main mechanisms: (1) order processing, (2) phonological and/or semantic processing, and (3) attentional capture (Hughes, Vachon, & Jones, 2007; Klatte, Bergström, & Lachmann, 2013, a summary of previous studies is in Appendix). According to the order processing account, background noise composed of a series of distinct, successive sounds, is perceived as ordered and interferes with tasks involving order processing, such as serial recall. This interpretation is supported by laboratory experiments in which adults (Jones & Macken, 1993; Jones, Macken, & Murray, 1993) and children (Elliott, 2002; Elliott et al., 2016; Elliott & Briganti, 2012; Klatte, Lachmann, Schlittmeier, & Hellbrück, 2010; Klatte, Meis, Sukowski, & Schick, 2007) remember series of items (e.g., letter, words) in the presence of various distracting sounds (e.g., series of digits, words, tones). It is hard to generalize results to naturalistic noise stimuli that are not explicitly segmented (e.g., full utterances or conversations with overlapping sources of noise) and to tasks beyond serial recall. This lack of generalization reduces the educational and practical relevance of the findings. The phonological processing account suggests that noise interference occurs in working memory, a system allowing for the maintenance, storage, and manipulation of information. In working memory, the phonological loop stores and rehearses phonological representations that are presented visually (e.g., when reading words) and auditorily (e.g., when hearing speech; Baddeley, 2003). When visual and auditory representations are processed at the same time, they interfere with each other. This account explains the negative impact of background speech on serial recall, text recall (Boman, 2004), mathematics, reading, and spelling (Dockrell & Shield, 2006); all of which involve the processing of phonological information in working memory. As shown in adult experiments, having a better working memory reduces the impact of noise on serial recall (Sörqvist, 2010), text recall (Sörqvist, Ljungberg, & Ljung, 2010), and reading comprehension (Sörqvist, Halin, & Hygge, 2010). © 2022 The Authors. Mind, Brain, and Education published by International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Wiley Periodicals LLC. 1 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Dealing With Classroom Noise Noise is expected to be less detrimental to task performance when its phonological features are less salient. This is the case when multiple people talk at the same time or when conversations overlap with environmental noise. These types of noise do not impact on primary school students’ mathematics performance (Dockrell & Shield, 2006) or on middle school students’ reading (Slater, 1968) and mathematics (Ljung, Sörqvist, & Hygge, 2009) performance. Neely and LeCompte (1999) suggested that it was competing semantic, and not phonological, processing that explained the amount of interference between the noise and the task at hand. Importantly, both of the phonological and semantic expanations focus on the speech-like properties of the distracting sounds. Some evidence runs counter to the phonological and semantic accounts of noise interference: (1) Kassinove (1972) found no impact of verbal noise on mathematics performance in primary and middle school students, (2) classroom noise without speech impairs children’s ability to recall a text (Klatte et al., 2010), and (3) background conversations overlapping with environmental noise can have a positive impact on reading, spelling (Dockrell & Shield, 2006), reading comprehension (Connolly et al., 2019), and mathematics (Zentall & Shaw, 1980). This is where the attentional capture account comes into play. It posits that noise captures attention and, in doing so, distracts participants from their main task (Hughes et al., 2007). According to Klatte et al. (2013), “auditory events that are salient (e.g., of personal significance), unexpected (e.g., slamming of a door), or deviant from the recent auditory context (e.g., change in voice in a speech stream) have a strong potential to capture attention.” (p. 3). The attentional capture account explains why verbal and classroom noise without speech both have a negative impact on memory: by redirecting participants’ attention away from the information to be remembered, it can lead them to “miss out” some items. This theory can also explain why, paradoxically, some types of noise, such as a mix of background conversations and environmental noise, have a positive impact on reading and mathematics. This could be due to: (1) attention being redirected away, and then back to the main task, involving a re-focus of attention (Dockrell & Shield, 2006), (2) attentional disruption favoring abstract processing and conceptual association, as suggested in the creativity literature (Mehta, Zhu, & Cheema, 2012). It is possible that, for these positive effects to occur, the noise should not contain salient phonological information that interferes with working memory. Few experiments have directly measured working memory and attentional processes to test the phonological processing and attentional capture accounts. Studies investigating the role of working memory in noise interference have only involved adults (Sörqvist, 2010; Sörqvist, Halin, & Hygge, 2010; Sörqvist, Ljungberg, & Ljung, 2010). Developmental studies have indirectly tested the role of attention by showing that children (whose attentional skills are still developing) generally have a greater noise-related impediment than adults (Elliott, 2002; Elliott et al., 2016; Joseph, Hughes, Sörqvist, & Marsh, 2018; Klatte et al., 2010). Massonnié, Rogers, Mareschal, and Kirkham (2019) showed that primary school children with poor selective attention were particularly vulnerable to mixed noise when completing a divergent thinking task. This effect was driven by children who were in their early primary school years (from 5 up to 8 years of age). Older children, between 8 and 11 years of age, did not perform differently in silence and noise irrespective of their selective attention skills. More work needs to be done to understand why children may struggle with noise and if this is related to general attention mechanisms (Erickson & Newman, 2017). Furthermore, more studies are needed to specifically replicate the positive impact of hearing a mix of background conversations and environmental noise on academic tasks, and connect this impact to attentional mechanisms. Study Aims The present study investigated whether individual differences in working memory and selective attention relate to the impact of noise on academic tasks. It focuses on children in upper primary school (Key stage 2 in the United Kingdom), an age at which foundational literacy and numeracy skills are in place, the focus being on utilizing these skills in the context of elaboration, problem solving, and comprehension skills (Department for Education, 2013). The additional reflective components of this higher-level work may be particularly vulnerable to the distracting effects of noise. Three outcome measures were selected: reading comprehension, mathematics (two compulsory national subjects), and text recall (a testing method used in schools, and a more naturalistic measure of memory than serial recall). Two types of noise were selected to allow for comparison with the literature: (1) verbal noise (e.g., someone telling a story) and (2) a mix of overlapping conversations and background noise (henceforth called “mixed noise”). Verbal noise was predicted to have a negative impact on all three tasks, due to phonological interference. Because phonological interference is hypothesized to take place in working memory, lower working memory was expected to relate to a higher impact of verbal noise.