Why tiles make nervous kids calmer at school

By Stephen Beech

Nervous children starting school can be calmed by sound insulation tiles, suggests a new study.

The architecture of a room can help to soothe at least some of the concerns of youngsters when they are first separated from parents, meeting new people, and hearing new noises, say Japanese scientists.

They explained that children in the process of developing language and speech can have a hard time listening, so a classroom with lots of noise and reverberation can disturb communication and cause them to talk louder.

Ikuri Matsuoka, a master’s student at Kumamoto University in Japan, said: “Classrooms without any sound absorption are the majority in Japan.

"My motivation was to make people aware of the importance of acoustics in classrooms because in Japan, there are no standards or guidelines for the acoustic design of preschool and school classrooms.

“We expect that preschool children entering school for the first time normally feel stressed by the difficulty of verbal communication.

“Therefore, this study examined whether sound absorption could mitigate such adverse effects.”

To test the effect of sound absorption on children’s noise, the research team installed polyester fibreboard, a type of sound-absorbing material, onto one classroom’s ceiling and compared it to another without any.

Researchers analysed the indoor activities using video and audio to work out noise levels and the number of times the children cried.

After six months, the team found that children were louder in the room without the insulation.

Matsuoka said: “During the experiment, I interviewed the four teachers in the four classes several times.

“Three of the four teachers answered that they felt the reverberation had changed, and one of them, a veteran teacher with 25 years of experience, answered that she felt clearly more comfortable talking to the children.”

The research team also used artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse the data automatically.

They used an acoustic event detection method to identify children’s crying instead of manually scrubbing through the data.

Matsuoka added: “We expect that machine learning will be necessary for long-term observations.

"From our research, we hope that those involved in both the child care and architectural fields recognise how important it is to have reduced reverberation that mitigate noisy atmosphere and promote clear verbal communication for children.”

The findings were presented at the joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and International Congress on Acoustics in New Orleans, Louisiana.