Walk into a classroom and at one point or another, the teacher will say, “lets use our inside voices now!” This originates from research showing the negative effects of high levels of noise on student learning. In a New York Times article, environmental psychologist, Lorraine E. Maxwell speaks about this effect. She describes a school in New York, a beautiful school, but not conducive to learning. Why? Because the ceilings were so high, the walls only went halfway up. As a result, sound would just go up and echo. She called it a “tiring environment” (p.21) in which it was hard to hear. However, when noise levels were brought down through higher insulation of the walls, academic performance strengthened. Specifically, students’ language skills improved as word use increased along with use of complete sentences (Zernicke, 2001).

This example reinforces research of the past 40 plus years which highlights the negative effects of high noise levels on the cognitive progression of students – specifically the older groups around 11 years and up (Shield and Dockrell, 2007). For the physical classroom setting, the most influential noise is the “typical classroom noise” (Shield and Dockrell, 2007, p.133), that which is generated inside the classroom. These researchers find that this noise specifically affects recognition of letters, words, and numbers. Shield and Dockrell (2007) also found a detrimental effect of external noises. Whereas internal noise is more background noise, the external noises found to be most influential on this older group of students was individual events. These include sounds that occur and pass by; for example, a motorbike or a plane. Another study looked specifically at the effects of noise and sound levels on long-term recall and recognition, again in intermediate level students (Hygge, 2003). Although there was an affect on both, “recall was reliably more vulnerable than recognition” (Hygge, 2003, p.910). Hygge (2003) explains this through detrimental effects on encoding; that is, when high levels of background noise is present, material is not processed deeply enough to be recalled successfully. In the end, noise levels affect basic processing abilities, which are so essential to learning resulting in cross-curricular impairments.