Brown runs through her lessons, her voice amplified by a four-speaker surround sound system in her classroom, her students listening attentively.

'This is my first year using it and I really love it,' said Brown, a 28-year teaching veteran. "I'd recommend it to anyone. It really saves my voice and the kids are a lot more attentive now.'

The system is a research-based teaching method that school administrators contend is helping raise test scores. The system not only enables students to clearly distinguish sounds but also keeps their attention focused, Principal Helen Amestoy said.

Second-grader Vincent Wolfram likes the new system.

"Its easier to hear her now,' 7-year-old Vincent said of his teacher. "Before it was hard to hear in the back.'

As a teacher, Amestoy used a similar system five years ago and noticed the children were less disruptive and more attentive. Surround-sound systems are especially beneficial for students learning English and for special education students.

Children do not listen in the same way adults do, because their auditory network does not fully develop until their mid-teens. They also lack the life experience, and in the case of non-English speakers, the language, to fill in words they miss during a lesson, Amestoy said.

"With the surround-sound system they can hear every word wherever they are sitting in the front or the back of the class,' she said. "They aren't going to be as distracted by outside playground noise either.'

This is the first year that all classrooms at Central Elementary have been outfitted with the $1,000 speaker systems although the school began installing the systems two years ago.

State test scores are used along with the participation rates of subgroups like English-language learners and special-education students, and the percentage of students proficient in English/language arts and mathematics, to help tally whether federal requirements are being met.

Those two groups generally lag behind in both the state and federal progress reports. But Central Elementary, where half the students are English learners, saw a 29-point rise in test scores last year, Amestoy said.

Federal education officials have also recognized the importance of sound in learning. In 1999, the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board passed a federal mandate to develop improved acoustical standards for all new and remodeled classrooms.

"The data shows children with hearing loss and (English-as-a-second-language) students have a need for better acoustical standards,' said Lois Thibault, coordinator of research for the federal compliance board. "They aren't good lip-readers and they don't focus well with a lot of noise.

"As adults, we are very sophisticated listeners but young listeners need better conditions.'

Such systems should only be installed, however, in classrooms with superior acoustics, Thibault said. Otherwise, background noise and reverberation are amplified, causing more problems for hearing-impaired students.

First-grader Alejandra Ragin said the new sound system has helped her drown out background noise.

"I heard a lot of people talking (before),' the 6-year-old said. "And it's not too loud it doesn't hurt my head.'

By Selicia Kennedy-Ross