Studying for an exam in an open-plan study environment: Does background noise impair performance?

摘要

Students in higher education work for a large part of their time in rather noisy open-plan study environments (OPSEs). A recent field research has shown that almost 40 percent of the students were 'much' to 'very much' disturbed by background noise while working in an OPSE. Moreover, the students indicated that they were very disturbed by the background noise when they were studying for an exam. Although the influence of background noise on different cognitive tasks has been shown in many studies, little is known about this student task. Therefore, the aim of this work is to analyze the influence of background noise on the 'studying for an exam' task in an OPSE. For this experiment a set of tasks was developed to simulate 'studying for an exam'. As output measures, the performance of students was measured while performing the simulated studying task in different realistic background sound scenarios. These sound scenarios varying in background speech and room acoustics were developed using computational acoustic modelling of an existing OPSE and applying auralization with student voices. In the current paper the research design and first results of the experiments are presented.