How In-Home Noise may be Affecting Learning at Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: The Cascading Educational Impacts of COVID-19

Abstract

Intro
With it being well documented that noise and distraction negatively affects attention and learning across development (Shield & Dockrell, 2003), how have the 1.6 billion children who have had to continue their education at home during the COVID-19 pandemic (unicef.org) been affected by in-home noise? Homes are not built like schools, in that they are built to serve many functions other than just a learning environment, and they often contain several people completing different tasks. This is even more true for homes of lower SES backgrounds, which often contain higher levels of noise and house more people in smaller spaces (Casey et al., 2017). So how is this variety of in-home noise impacting adolescents’ ability to learn? Are adolescents from noisier homes, with more experience with inhibiting noise, better at coping with this distraction?
Methods
U.K. based adolescents aged 11-to-18-years completed an online experiment on Gorilla (gorilla.sc), which included the Flanker task, the Backward Digit Span (BDS) task, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). Participants were either in the Home Noise or White Noise conditions, listening to either an audio recording of a naturalistic noisy home environment or white noise through their headphones throughout all tasks. They also completed an SES questionnaire and an In-Home Noise Questionnaire, the latter being scored and used to group participants into noisier and quieter homes based on a median split.
Results
Our hypotheses and analysis were preregistered on aspredicted.org (#45752). Our main hypotheses are that overall, children in the Home Noise condition will perform worse compared to their peers in the White Noise condition, and that adolescents from noisier homes will show less of a negative effect in the Home Noise condition compared to the participants from quieter homes due to more noise experience. The current results are based on 69 participants of the planned 128 and are all controlled for age. Interestingly, currently there is no trending effect of White Noise versus Home Noise on the performance of all three tasks. However, we do see a trending main effect of in-home noise. In the BDS task, regardless of the background audio, participants from noisier homes are showing fewer correct trials (p = .085), a lower accomplished level (p = .112), and a lower proportion correct (p = .069) compared to their peers. The opposite trend may appear in the WCST, a task that contains distraction and requires inhibition within the task. It appears as though some significant interactions with in-home noise and background audio noise may arise with more data. Online data collection should be completed within two-months’ time.
Conclusions
These findings would show that regardless of the current learning environment, there could be both negative and positive long-term learning effects from being regularly exposed to a noisy home environment. Furthermore, it may be that when learning in a noisier environment, children with more noise experience will be less negatively affected by it. This will shed important light on how children are learning and coping in their homes during the pandemic.

Authors

• Brittney Chere, Birkbeck University of London
  Presenting Author

• Natasha Kirkham, Birkbeck University of London
  Non-Presenting Author