The effect of the classroom sensory environment on engagement for autistic pupils: classroom noise and classroom displays

Classrooms are really important physical spaces within which children do most of their learning at school. We need to understand how these spaces should be designed and organised to support learning. This is important for all children, but it may be even more important for autistic and neurodivergent children, as they often have attentional differences and sensory issues. In this study, we created a mini-classroom, within which we ran an experiment with autistic and non-autistic children, to look at how classroom sensory features (visual displays and classroom noise) impacted the amount of time children spent engaged in a reading comprehension task, or ‘off-task’. We video recorded the participants while they completed a reading comprehension task in four different conditions (no displays and no noise, displays visible, classroom noise, and displays and classroom noise). We found that off-task behaviours were greatest in the two conditions where the displays were on the walls. This effect was much greater for the autistic children. We did not find an effect of noise, which was surprising, but we think this is because it is hard to replicate the unexpected noises that happen in a classroom that cause the most impact for autistic children. We think these results have implications for how teachers should decorate their classrooms, in order to avoid negative effects for autistic and neurodivergent children with attention and sensory differences.