Welcome to our study on teacher’s voices.
Educators will likely know that the way we speak can be used to effectively motivate and direct children in their play and learning. Imagine saying things like “try this puzzle piece” or a “tidy away your pens”; depending on how you modulate your voice, the child may respond very differently.
Interestingly, there are very few systematic studies on the effects of voice on pupil’s learning, enjoyment, and motivation. Our study aims to fill this gap in the literature by providing teachers and other relevant parties with an insight into how voices affect students. To this aim, we are currently recording voice samples from teachers who are willing to volunteer their precious time to our project. Specifically, we ask teachers and those who train to be teachers to intone a number of different materials in different tones of voice that might be used in the classroom. The key here is for us not to be prescriptive in how we think an utterance such as “pick up your coat” should be spoken. Rather, we are trying to establish how real teachers utter such instructions by analysing their voice samples acoustically. We will specifically look at pitch, loudness, speech rate and voice quality. This will allow us to describe an acoustic profile for the different voices that we are interested in. Finally, we are hoping to continue our work by using some of these materials in further studies to test for their effectiveness.
If you are interested in participating, and have not yet received specific instructions, please contact Prof. Silke Paulmann from the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. She will send you detailed instructions on what we are looking for.