Indoor Environmental QUALITY in classrooms: children’s listening comfort for inclusive learning

The project aims at giving a contribution to the definition of the indoor environmental characteristics needed in school classrooms to guarantee pupils’ listening comfort and learning performance. Among the four main categories of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), listening conditions are the factor most connected to children’s well-being and learning in the classroom. Despite a large literature on the topic, the specific contribution of the acoustic component of IEQ has not been yet clearly correlated to the children’s auditory and cognitive performance, because the majority of the studies focus on real classrooms, without controlling simultaneously the environmental parameters. To overcome this issue, the project adopts a systematic experimental approach that consists in submitting the same tests to a sample of 80 school children, some of whom are known to be hearing-impaired, both in a controlled laboratory and in the real classroom.