Sound Quality In The Classroom

An Educational Psychology Presentation by Emily Wynans, Maddy Rich, and Keerat Jawanda.

How Does Sound Play A Role In The Classroom?

Whether teaching in-person or online, sound will almost always be a crucial factor in your classes. Good audio will help you as teachers connect to your students and consequently connect your students with your learning content.

Audio is used in many different ways in today’s classrooms. One of the most obvious ones would be the teacher and the students talking to each other, the teacher talking, and other students presenting. Other ways are through incorporating technology into your lessons such as playing short videos, movies, streaming audio, and presenting student work to the rest of the class. These are all important teaching tools which means poor sound quality can hinder not only a students learning experience but also impact an educator’s teaching experience.

How can we avoid poor audio and promote positive learning and teaching experiences through sound? Stay tuned to find out!

Common Sound Quality Problems Faced By Educators

We have all likely been in a situation in a classroom where your teacher had planned on showing you a video or any other sound based content but was unable to immediately do so due to an issue like connecting to sound, the audio being too quiet, or the sound quality being poor. During these moments, students are more susceptible to being distracted because the flow of the lesson has been interrupted.

If you have experienced the first case, while the teacher gets busy trying to connect to audio, you may have noticed that you and your classmates may have started conversing with each other. It is more than likely that your conversations did not revolve around the material your teacher had been discussing. 

At that point, if the teacher is able to connect to sound they may continue on with the lesson but only after getting their students back on track. If they are unable to connect to sound, they have to think of an ulterior activity. While thinking on the spot is definitely an expected part of teaching, it can be tedious and somewhat disappointing to discard a part of a lesson that you had put time and effort into. In the second and third cases of the sound either being too quiet or poor, it may be likely that not all students are being engaged. With the audio being too quiet or poor, it is not being evenly dispersed around the classroom.

Another problem faced by educators may be projecting their voice. Many factors can lead to this. Sometimes people just naturally have a more soft voice. Other times the classroom is larger in size so reaching students in the back may be more difficult. This will have a similar impact as having audio that is too quiet on a video; the students that are the closest to the teacher may be able to hear, but students further away may not. This can have a negative impact on classroom engagement. 

Classroom layout can also have an impact on sound. The design of the classroom and the distance between teacher and students are factors of audio quality. Other sound problems may even come from outside the classroom. If your classroom is facing a busy street traffic noises may be an issue. There may also be noises from the hallway such as other students that can cause distracting background noises.

Now that we have gone over all of the sound problems that you may come across as future teachers and how they can negatively impact not only your teaching experience but also your students’ ability to connect with the learning material, keep reading to find out how to avoid and fix these common problems!

Why Is Good Sound Quality Important?

As you can see from comparing these two videos, sound quality makes a BIG difference. When we talk about sound quality in regards to education, it is especially important that educators do their best to ensure that the quality of sound is as good as it can be. This is because sound quality impacts student engagement and, thus, their ability to understand and retain class content.

How To Improve Sound Quality In Your Classroom

Because there is a large variety of ways that sound can be used in the classroom, there exists a broad range of techniques for improving sound quality. Here are a few of the simplest solutions that we’ve found for doing so:

Voice Projection

This may seem too simple to some, but voice projection plays a huge role in sound quality. If you’re a teacher, make sure that when you’re speaking in your classroom that your voice is clear and strong, and that students positioned anywhere in the room are able to hear you clearly.

Microphone Use

If even your best efforts of voice projection fall short of every student being able to hear you clearly and sufficiently, don’t be afraid to explore the option of using a microphone in your classroom, especially if you’re in a very large room.

Whether it’s a lapel microphone or otherwise, this can definitely aid in audibility, and allows for less strain on your voice. This can also be a great tool to use if you have students with hearing accessibility needs, because there exists mics that connect directly to student hearing devices for situations like that.

You also want to ensure that your microphone quality is being optimized. While you may not have the funding to buy a high-quality, expensive microphone for your classroom, take simple measures such as positioning yourself close to the mic while speaking and enunciating clearly to optimize your sound quality.

For more microphone-specific tips, we invite you to explore a related resource here.

Optimizing Sound Quality In External Resources

Today’s classrooms are often using a wide variety of external resources, whether they be videos, podcasts, movies, etc, to aid in student learning. If you are pulling on resources from other sources, here are some of our recommendations:

1. Initial Sound Quality: Search out resources with high sound quality. If you are pulling on youtube videos in your classroom that have poor sound quality to begin with, odds are that students won’t be able to fully benefit from the video and that sound quality will interfere with their learning ability.
2. Subtitles: Do your best to use subtitles whenever possible. While this doesn’t directly aid in sound quality, it can definitely help students better understand what is being said, especially any students with accessibility needs or students whose first language is not the one that you’re speaking in class.
3. Volume: Optimize your volume. Ensure that the volume on the resource, your computer, and the sound system in your classroom are all set at a suitable level, and are communicating properly with each other. This connection is often a good think to check before using these resources in class because technical issues do happen and can interrupt with the flow of your teaching.

Now, if you’re creating your own videos, podcasts, etc, for use in your teaching, the subtitles and volume suggestions still apply, but maybe consider these next few suggestions as well:

1. Acoustics: Ensure that you are recording your video in a room with good acoustics. Having good acoustics for recording is different than our suggestions for addressing acoustics in your classroom that are outlined below, so here are a few quick suggestions for that:
   • Make sure any reflective surfaces are adjacent to you and your speakers so that sound does not bounce off of them, or cover them with thick curtains.
   • Avoid recording in corners where sound can get distorted.
2. Microphone Position: Position your microphone close to you while speaking (about 4 to 6 inches away) to help improve volume and clarity while reducing conflicting background noise.
3. Microphone Quality: Use the highest quality microphone you have access to. This may seem obvious, but if your laptop has a higher quality microphone than your phone, consider using that to record instead.

Improving Your Classrooms Acoustics

Excess noise in classrooms can be extremely distracting for students and teachers alike while class is in progress. While you may have no control over the classroom you are in or the furniture within it, there are a few cost-effective ways you can improve your classroom acoustics.

1. Furnishings: If you do have the resources to add extra furnishings, adding soft surfaces such as carpets and rugs can help dampen sound and prevent it from reverberating throughout the classroom. Adding baffles or ceiling panels can have a similar effect.
2. Windows and Doors: Noise outside the classroom can often be loud and distracting, whether it’s the sound of other students talking in the hallways or cars speeding down a nearby highway. Closing windows and doors while teaching can help reduce this external sound.
3. Ambient Noise: Playing ambient music quietly in your classrooms can help cover those distracting classroom noises that we’ve been discussing.
4. Plants: Adding plants throughout your classroom can help absorb sound, similar to soft furnishings.

Addressing Accessibility Needs

If you have students in your classroom with any hearing difficulties or particular hearing accessibility needs, it’s important that you make an effort as a teacher to understand what these needs are, and to do your best in ensuring those needs get met.

While most of the solutions we have already discussed for improving sound quality can apply, there are a few that we want to address in particular:

1. Physical Position: Pay attention to where you position yourself in the classroom while you’re speaking, and do your best to avoid wandering far away from students with hearing difficulties while addressing the class. Similarly, suggest to students that if they have hearing difficulties to sit close to where you position yourself while teaching.
2. Volume and Subtitles: As mentioned prior, use subtitles with external resources whenever possible and ensure volume levels are optimized for students ease of following along.
3. Microphone Use: If your classroom is large or any of your students have hearing devices that allow for direct microphone connection, consider using a microphone in your classroom either for the entire class or for those students directly.

While there are many more ways that one can improve sound quality in the classroom and more details we could explore for each heading, these are some of the top recommendations we have found, and a great place to start if you haven’t considered this topic before.

Summary

At the end of the day, our goal as teachers should always be to engage all students. With high sound quality in classrooms acting as a key contributor to student engagement, here is a brief recap of what we’ve covered in this article regarding the importance of good sound quality in classrooms:

• Sound plays a huge role in the classroom, so maintaining good sound quality is very important for students’ learning.
• The ways in which you can improve sound quality in the classroom include voice projection, microphone usage, optimizing sound quality with external resources, and improving classroom acoustics.
• It is important to accommodate for the different accessibility needs in regards to sound quality through physical positioning, microphone use, volume, and subtitles.

References

Fitzjohn, S. (2022). 4 Tips to Improve Room Acoustics With Zero Budget. Producer Hive. https://producerhive.com/music-production-recording-tips/how-to-improve-room-acoustics-with-no-budget/

HearingPlanet Team. (2022). 3 Ways Schools Can Make Themselves More Accessible to The Hard of Hearing. Hearing Planet. https://www.hearingplanet.com/blog/post/how-to-make-schools-accessible-to-the-hard-of-hearing

Lombardo, C. And Mordell, D. (April 12, 2021). 10 Tips to Improve The Audio Quality in Your Video Recordings. McMaster University. https://mi.mcmaster.ca/10-tips-to-improve-the-audio-quality-in-your-video-recordings/

Sound Zero Ltd. (2022). 7 Cost Effective Ways to Control School Acoustics. Sound Zero. https://sound-zero.com/blog/

Syncho Audio. (February 17, 2022). Microphone For Teaching: 3 Things to Know For Better Classes. Syncho. https://www.syncoaudio.com/blogs/news/3-things-to-know-microphone-for-teaching