June 2007 — Features
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Sound Solutions
A multiyear study conducted by Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, FL, “High Performance Schools Equals High Performing Students,” provides a summary, damning state of affairs: “Research has shown that a typical classroom provides an inadequate environment when auditory learning is the primary tool of instruction. As many as one-third of all students miss 33 percent of verbal communication in a typical classroom."
Hearing Is Believing
Technology has come up with a solution: tools that focus voices in a way that minimizes intrusive ambient noise and gets to the intended receiver—not merely amplifying the sound, but also clarifying and directing it.
CAN YOU HEAR HER NOW?
Propelled by her son’s own classroom auditory troubles, one parent became an advocate for sound enhancement technology.
Christopher
DeMallie was in kindergarten when he began to struggle in school. He couldn’t
sing the alphabet song; he misused his pronouns; he wouldn’t participate
in “circle time”; and in general, he’d become upset whenever the conversation
turned to school. Searching for a solution, his mother, Suzanne, took Christopher
to a pediatrician, a psychologist, and finally an audiologist. The audiologist
concluded that Christopher had a “temporal processing deficit”—sounds got
distorted on the way to his brain.
Christopher’s teacher placed him away from open windows and doors so the ambient noise wouldn’t interfere with his hearing, and his mother got him some private speech therapy. Today, three years later, Christopher is fine, deficit-free.
As a result of her experience with her son, Suzanne began to educate herself on hearing problems. She discovered that students who couldn’t hear well and thus became distracted or disinterested were sometimes being misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and even being prescribed Ritalin, when what was needed was a better classroom environment. Her research showed her that classroom acoustics were typically to blame. DeMallie concluded that children with much better hearing than her son were still facing auditory deficits in school.
She started her own organization last summer, the Institute for Enhanced Classroom Hearing, in Towson, MD, with a mission to “improve the auditory classroom environment through integration of classroom sound enhancement technology.” DeMallie sees the research into the benefits of sound amplification systems as conclusive (“It’s a no-brainer”), the cost as manageable (“It’s a lot cheaper than retrofitting the classroom”), and the need universal (“This problem affects every child every day in every classroom”).
The cost of enabling every student in a classroom to hear clearly is not as daunting as it may seem. For an adequate sound amplification system, DeMallie recommends “an infrared model with four speakers and a pass-around microphone for the students, at an approximate cost of $1,500 to $1,700, which should include professional installation and in-service training.” According to DeMallie’s calculations, that averages out to 16 cents a day per pupil (given 25 students per classroom). And, she adds, the sound system is used about five hours per day, not just a sporadic few minutes here and there, as other classroom technologies such as a TV/VCR are used.
“When research overwhelmingly supports an educational need that is financially justified and reasonable,” she says, “we as a society owe it to the children to supply them with that resource. Every child deserves a chance to hear the teacher. Every teacher is important enough to be heard.”
