Children & Noise
Noise poses a serious threat to our children’s hearing, health, learning and behavior. Recent research suggests that quiet promotes an environment which will foster learning, as well as the opportunity for parents and children to enjoy each other’s company. Parents must analyze their own home and recreational activities and make every effort to include quiet times with their children, reading, talking around the dinner table and listening to their children.
Noise & Its Effect on Children's Learning
Effects of Noise on Children's Learning
Noise poses a serious threat to our children's hearing, health, learning and behavior. Recent research suggests that quiet promotes an environment which will foster learning, as well as the opportunity for parents and children to enjoy each other's company. Parents must analyze their own home and recreational activities and make every effort to include quiet time with their children, reading, talking around the dinner table and listening to their children.
Noise and Children's Learning
Studies show the noise negatively impacts children's cognitive development. Dr. Arline Bronzaft and Dr. Dennis McCarthy, in a landmark study in 1975, found that students' reading scores were affected by noise. Dr. Bronzaft and Dr. McCarthy examined reading scores of children in a school where classes were located adjacent to elevated train tracks and compared them with reading scores of students on the quiet side of the school. The researchers found that by sixth grade, the students on the noisy side of school tested one year behind those on the quiet side of the school. In a follow-up study in 1981, noise abatement had been provided by the Transit Authority and the Board of Education and Dr. Bronzaft found that reading scores between the two groups were now equal.
Several studies have shown that children's cognitive development is affected by aircraft noise. In a 1982 study, Green found that children living near airports had lower reading scores than children living further away from airports. In a study by Gary Evans and Lorraine Maxwell at Cornell University (1997), it was found that children whose schools were affected by aircraft noise did not learn to read as well as those who were in quiet schools. The researchers compared children in a noisy school (in the flight path of a major international airport) with similar students in a quiet school and found that children in the noisy school had difficulty acquiring speech recognition skills, impacting on the ability to learn to read.
Parent Responsibility
Parents, teachers and government officials must recognize noise as a serious hazard with deleterious effects to children's learning. It is critical to provide children with quiet environments to read, study, learn or just relax. Our future depends on it.
Please see the Noise Center’s References & Suggested Resources
