Studies have shown that students in the back row may miss up to 40% of what the teacher is saying.

Why are the 'problem kids' usually in the back row?

Seating position is a strong predictor of student performance. Most of us assume that children who are not academically strong gravitate toward the back row if given a choice — and then take advantage of that position to misbehave. The evidence suggests, however, that the seating position itself is the problem.

For example, researchers investigating the impact of teacher-student distance on the performance of 5- to 7-year olds found tremendous disadvantages to sitting in the middle or rear of the classroom. In the study, lists of simple sentences were read to the students in a room with a typical background noise level of 59dB and a reverberation time of 0.46 seconds. All of the students had normal hearing, yet while children seated 6 feet from the teacher correctly understood the sentences 82% of the time, students sitting 12 feet away only got 55% correct on average. More disturbing, children at the back of the classroom (24 feet away) only scored 36% correct on average.

Mean speech recognition scores (in % correct) of children with normal hearing in a "typical" classroom environment.

Because students seated far from the teacher do not have equal access to verbal instruction, they are generally more likely to exhibit poorer academic performance, and more frequent behavior problems. When less than half of the instructional content is arriving to a student intact, it takes far greater effort for her to succeed than for her peers sitting in front. This concentration effort understandably leads to exhaustion, distraction, and acting out.

Teacher movement throughout the classroom is not ultimately a solution, either, since at any given moment some students will still be far from the teacher.

Give every child a front row seat

In order to give students equal access to verbal instruction, we need to keep the teacher's voice consistently close to each student's ears. This is easily done with a FrontRow sound system — speakers are placed in the classroom to ensure even coverage and clarity throughout the student seating area. In this way, schools can essentially give every child a front row seat.