Excellent! Classroom Acoustics Booklet from the Acoustical Society of America
If you've been thinking that your school architect will automatically design your school's ventilation system to pass the upcoming ADA guidelines for classroom acoustics, you may be surprised!
"In many classrooms in the United States, the speech intelligibility rating is 75 percent or less. That means that, in speech intelligibility tests, listeners with normal hearing can understand only 75 percent of the words read from a list. Imagine reading a textbook with every fourth word missing, and being expected to understand the material and be tested on it." (Quote from the booklet. Emphasis, mine.)
This booklet, written in terms appropriate to school board members, architects, and facilities planners, gives a concise, but complete, review of how to plan to have classrooms meet the soon-to-be-announced ADA guidelines for classroom acoustics.
Definitions of technical acoustical terms, review of the principles of good acoustical design... and more... are available in this on-line booklet.
"The best way to solve acoustics problems is to prevent them beforehand, not correct them after the fact. During the design process, acoustics problems can usually be avoided with a bit of forethought and a different arrangement of the same building materials. Renovation of poorly designed classrooms is much more expensive. Even then, the cost of renovation is small compared to the social costs of poor classroom acoustics that impair the learning of millions of children." (Quote from the booklet.)
Click on: http://www.nonoise.org/quietnet/qc/ then click on "Our booklet Classroom Acoustics is now online."
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