Impact of sonification on students’ engagement in formal school settings

Investigate the impact of sonification-based teaching tools on students’ engagement with science in regular school settings, distinguishing effects from those observed in informal environments such as museums and planetariums.

Background

The paper notes strong interest in using sonification to complement visual teaching in STEM and references encouraging results from informal educational contexts (e.g., museums and planetariums). However, such audiences are often self-selected and may already be positively inclined toward science, raising concerns about bias when generalizing to typical classrooms.

The authors emphasize the need to understand whether sonification can positively affect engagement within formal school environments. In their own middle-school paper, they measured engagement with the mATSI instrument and found no significant pre-post changes after two sessions, underscoring the need for broader, more sustained investigations.