The effect of classroom architecture on academic progress in primary-school children
Communicating in large, noisy spaces (restaurants, shopping centres etc) is tough. Trying to piece together snippets of conversation in background noise is frustrating, exhausting and often unproductive. Why then, do we so often force children to learn in the most acoustically hostile of school environments – the open-plan classroom?
Between 2016 and 2019 we carried out a study (funded by the Victorian Department of Education and Training) looking at academic progress in open versus enclosed classrooms. Our initial objective was to explore how students with hearing difficulties were coping in these challenging learning spaces. What we instead found was that all mid-late primary-school students are at risk of academic delay in the open-plan setting. Our findings, published last year in the Nature Partner Journal: Science of Learning, showed that simply closing an acoustic partition (i.e. bisecting the open-plan space with one class group on either side) resulted in a doubling of the rate of reading fluency development in Grade 3 and 4 students.
Our study has generated considerable community interest and appears to be changing policy. We are currently advising the Victorian School Building Authority and the NSW Department of Education has already decided to end construction of new open-plan classrooms, stating in a recent letter to the NSW Teachers Federation that “current and future new and upgraded school projects will not include the construction of open-plan classrooms that cannot function as an individual space for a single class group”.
Rance, G., Dowell, R. C., & Tomlin, D. (2023). The effect of classroom environment on literacy development. NPJ Science of Learning, 8(1), 9. doi: 10.1038/s41539-023-00157-y.
- Audiology team, Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology
