Children spend much of their day in classrooms where understanding speech is often challenged by background noise [Shield and Dockrell, 2003]. This thesis reanalyzes data from two studies [Seitz et al., 2024; Seitz and Fels, 2025] to investigate how efficiently primary school children listen in classroom settings, using the metrics „Direct Listening Efficiency“ [Prodi et al., 2010], „Linear Integrated Speed–Accuracy Score“ [Liesefeld and Janczyk, 2019], „Balanced Integration Score“ [Liesefeld and Janczyk, 2019] and „Inverse Efficiency Score“ [Townsend and Ashby, 1983]. It examined how efficiency relates to children’s listening effort, and how it is affected by different factors like age group, noise/acoustic condition and task type. The trends that were observed for both experiments were that older children showed higher efficiency scores compared to the younger ones, that noise had a significant effect on children’s listening efficiency and that children showed lower listening efficiency in more difficult task types (dual-task). Also, in both experiments, results indicated that listening efficiency had a trend of being negatively correlated with subjective ratings of listening effort. These findings indicate that listening efficiency captures the speed-accuracy trade-off effect in realistic classroom environments. As a metric, it complements traditional measures such as the response time and could be used to guide acoustic improvements to support children’s listening in noise.

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