As awareness grows of the toll noise has on children's health and learning, some cities show the way to quieter roads and classrooms. In a New Yo

How traffic noise hurts children's brains

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2024-06-23 19:30:05

As awareness grows of the toll noise has on children's health and learning, some cities show the way to quieter roads and classrooms.

In a New York classroom, noise levels were so high that the teacher had to scream to be heard. The classroom was located near a subway train on raised tracks which passed by Public School 98 in Manhattan about 15 times a day, causing constant interruptions in the learning process.

For many years, people had complained about the noise levels at Public School 98, and in 1975, Arline Bronzaft, associate professor of psychology at Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, published a study examining the impact of noise on children's reading ability. She found that students who sat on the noisy side of the school building adjacent to the tracks performed poorly on reading tests compared to those on the quiet side of the building. The average reading scores of the classes on the noisy side lagged three to four months behind those of students on the quieter side.

As a result of Bronzaft's findings, the Transit Authority installed rubber pads on the tracks to reduce noise, and the Board of Education equipped classrooms with sound-absorbing materials to create a better learning environment.