Annoyance Judgment and Measurements of Environmental Noise: A Focus on Italian Secondary Schools

The effects of noise on students' health, well-being, and learning are of growing concernamong both the general public and policy-makers in Europe. Several studies have highlighted theconsequences of noise on children's learning and performance at school. This study investigates therelationship between noise judgment in school goers aged 11-18 and noise measurements aimedat evaluating their exposure at school. For this purpose, a questionnaire was administered to521 individuals in 28 classrooms in eight schools of four cities in Italy, with different environmentalcharacteristics. Using a Likert-type scale, a selected set of responses related to noise generatedan Annoyance Index (AI) score for each student and a classroom median score (MAI). From thenoise data acquired, a global noise score (GNS) was assigned to each classroom. A higher AI wasfound in industrialized areas and among younger students. No significant differences in noisejudgment were found by gender. A significant inverse correlation was described between MAIand GNS, thus the better the acoustic quality of the classrooms, the less the perceived noise andannoyance. The results show that noise perception and consequent disturbance are highly correlatedwith classroom acoustics, and confirm that annoyance represents the most widespread subjectiveresponse to noise.