Playing white noise in the classroom improves learning outcomes for distracted students, but has the opposite effect on students who are normally able to concentrate.
Noise is generally thought to distract attention from the subject and interfere with learning or other tasks that require concentration, but for some people, noise can actually help them concentrate.
An experiment conducted by researchers at
For details, see below. Abstract | The effects of background white noise on memory performance in inattentive school children
Noise is usually thought to interfere with concentration, but in some cases, performance on a task can be improved in an environment with moderate noise unrelated to the task, and this effect of noise has also been reported in children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) .Recent research has hypothesized that moderate noise can contribute to improved performance in people with reduced dopamine levels due to dopamine receptor blockade, using a computational model based on the theory of internal noise and stochastic resonance , which involves dopamine (the principle that when white noise is superimposed on a signal that is too quiet for the human ear to perceive, the signal becomes stronger and can be heard).
Computational neuroscience model predicts differences in performance between attentive children (dashed line) and distracted children (solid line) as a function of noise levels.
Göran Söderlund, a psychologist at Stockholm University, and his colleagues conducted an experiment with 51 students (25 boys and 26 girls) in two classes of seventh-grade students (11-12 years old) at a Norwegian junior high school. The students were rated by their teachers on a 7-point
White noise is a type of noise that has the same intensity at all frequencies, and is generally considered to be highly irregular. You can hear what it sounds like by clicking the link below.
White_noise.ogg
Six out of 10 students in the 'distractible' group were also rated by their teachers as 'hyperactive,' but none had been diagnosed with ADHD or were receiving medication. The students were also assessed for their school grades and reading comprehension, and their overall cognitive abilities, learning ability, short-term memory, reasoning ability, and problem-solving skills were also measured. Other than lower reading comprehension among the 'distractible' students, there were no differences in performance between the distractible and control groups.
In the experiment, the students were given a test to memorize sentences they had heard. The test, which included explanations and practice questions, lasted a total of 45 minutes. They listened to a list of 12 short sentences in random order and had to recall them. The sentences were short 'noun + verb' sentences, such as 'a ball' + 'roll,' and the list included eight types, a total of 96 sentences.
The speech was recorded in a studio on a CD and consisted of four 'noise-containing' and four 'noise-free' lists. The response time (the time it took for students to recall what they had heard) was noise-free. The white noise volume was 78 decibels , while the speech volume was 86 decibels—a difference in volume large enough for students to clearly hear the spoken sentences, yet loud enough to exceed the threshold at which previous research has shown noise to affect performance.
As a result, there was no difference in the scores for the entire test (96 sentences) between the distracted group and the control group, and when looking at all students, there was no difference in performance between the 'noise' and 'no noise' conditions.However, when comparing the scores for each group with 'noise' and 'no noise,' the results were the opposite: the distracted group performed better with 'noise,' while the control group performed better with 'no noise.'
Furthermore, there was a correlation between each student's 'difference in grades with and without noise' and 'attention assessed by teachers' (score on a 7-point scale), with students with higher scores (less attentive) experiencing a greater positive effect from noise, and students with lower scores (more attentive) experiencing a greater negative effect from noise. In other words, students who are normally more attentive are more likely to be distracted by noise.
'We hope to conduct further experiments with a larger number of subjects at various volumes in the future, and to see how noise can be utilized in educational settings. Since it seems to have the opposite effect on children who are normally attentive, it seems unlikely that white noise can be played all the time in a typical classroom. However, it may be possible in the near future to gather distracted children and teach them in small groups, or to help them do their homework at home.'
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