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Dr Michelle Todorov has 7 years of experience working as a clinical audiologist and researcher at The University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the education of children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Michelle has just completed her PhD whereby she investigated the classroom engagement of students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and attend mainstream schools.

This video is broken into chapters or sections so that you can skip to sections you are interested in and easily rewatch different parts of the video.

00:00 Introduction
01:17 Providing some context
02:46 Inclusive education
04:19 What is classroom engagement
05:35 Classroom engagement of children who are DHH
07:13 Aim of the study
07:30 Participants
08:27 Method of the study
09:35 Results – Barriers to engagement
18:09 Facilitators – Student Strategies
21:31 Facilitators – Supports to Students
23:56 Facilitators – Teacher Actions
27:54 Key findings and implications for practice

Todorov, M., Galvin, K., Punch, R., Klieve, S., & Rickards, F. (2021). Barriers and facilitators to engaging in mainstream primary school classrooms: Voices of students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Deafness & Education International, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14643154.2021.1992829 

Todorov, M., Galvin, K., Klieve, S., Rickards, F. (2021). Engagement of children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing attending mainstream schools. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 26(3), 395-404. https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enab003

Background noise was a barrier for all the children in the study and some of the classrooms did not meet the Australian Standards.

Classroom acoustics
Australia has acoustic standards and recommendations for primary school teaching spaces or single classrooms but these are not legislated or regulated. 
The recommended Australian Standards for typically developing children are:

• Unoccupied noise levels: < 35 dBA
• Occupied sound levels of <50 dBA
• Reverberation time: < 0.4-0.5 secs

Suggested signal-to-noise ratio (SNRs) in learning environments for listeners with sensorineural hearing loss: > +15dB

There are a number of free apps available for iOS and Android phones to measure decibel levels.

More information:

• Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand. (2016).  Acoustics – Recommended design sound levels and reverberation times for building interiors (AS/NZS 2107:2016).  SAI Global.  Read more... 
• Classroom acoustics | Inclusion Ed  Read more…