Abstract
Since 1990s in Korea, elementary school classrooms have been designed toward open education system in pursuit of variety of educational purpose. Also, the architectural designs of schools have been acomplished for individual school not based on the standard design code. The present paper aims to investigate the acoustic environment of existing classrooms and to compare the sound insulation capacity between the ordinary classrooms and the newly built classrooms for open education. The current acoustical situation of elementary classrooms was analyzed using field measurements and questionnaire survey. In order to this, Three elementary schools were selected which were built in 1978, 1996 and 2000 respectively. Room acoustical parameters including Reverberation time(RT), Definition(D50), Speech Intelligibility(RASTI), Transmission loss(TL) and STC were measured in a classroom in each elementary school classroom. Each measurement was undertaken with the windows and doors being open or closed. As the result, it was found that the transmission loss between rooms in open classrooms is, $5{\sim}6dB$ in average, inferior than the ordinary classrooms. The RASTI of 0.70 was measured in newly built classrooms which is better than old classrooms(0.70) and open classrooms(0.73). This was shown as same in the speech definition measurements. This results from the condition of sealing and airtightness of classrooms and floor materials. The results denote that open classrooms have poor acoustic condition in sound insulation and speech intelligibility.
