Does Listening to Music While Studying Facilitate Learning?
Posted by Tech Editor8 · 1 Comment
We all love music and most often enjoy it as a hobby. We may also use it to pass time while stuck in traffic, make our mundane chores more enjoyable and even to calm ourselves before a big presentation. Over the years, many studies have reported the positive effects of music on our health, emotions, productivity and even learning.
You might have seen students listening to music while studying or doing their homework. Whether to block out the sounds around or as a stimulant for learning, headphones can be an unexpected tool for learning.
The Mozart Effect:
In 1993, Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky conducted a study which reported that listening to Mozart music lead to a temporary increase in abstract spatial reasoning or spatial intelligence. These results were misinterpreted and revealed as; listening to Mozart music could enhance the IQ levels of the listener. The idea took on popularity and parents everywhere ensured that their infants listened to Mozart music in order to improve their IQ. But later studies, reported of inconclusive findings on the relation between music and learning.
Effects of Music on learning:
There are some who feel that music is a distraction to the process of learning, and others, who vouch for its positive benefits.
Listening to music, prior to studying has found to create a positive learning state. Many students state that listening to a preferred music helps them to calm down, release their tension and prepares them for learning by motivating and energizing them. Music also heightens their levels of attention and concentration, thus setting a stage for the learning process to occur.
Listening to music helps to enhance retrieval of information as students associate the contents learned to the rhyme, rhythm and melody of the music. It is said to improve productivity as it triggers the release of dopamine that helps to combat fatigue and boredom, in turn making the task of learning enjoyable.
The type of music one listens to also matters. Studies have reported that listening to music with 50-80 beats per minute is conducive for learning, as it creates an alpha state of the brain, wherein one’s alertness and concentration is amplified. This state stimulates the learning of new information and logical reasoning.
Instrumental music and background music is preferred over lyrical music and loud heavy music, as the latter may distract the students from their work.
For subjects like Mathematics, Science etc, where the left brain is involved in processing facts and solving problems, classical music has been reported to be effective owing to its soothing nature and ability to stimulate spatial- temporal reasoning. Similarly emotive music is found effective for subjects like English, Art etc as the music helps the students to tune in to and express their creative sides.
Thus we see that the right musical note, can strike a chord in a student’s learning process.
Brewer, Chris, Music and learning: Intergrating music in the class (taken from Music and learning: seven ways to use music in the classroom), 1995
Discuss here: How do you respond when a student wants to use music during quiet classwork?
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A search on ‘music for studying’ reveals that the controversy on whether or not music helps improve studying continues. The surveys that say no, seem to me, to be conducted by the same types of brains that create standardized testing as a way of measuring learning and intelligence. The assumption being that all brains think and learn alike.
One of the things I do in my practice of working with multisensory learners is give parents and their children a quick assessment that reveals to them how their brains learn differently – it blows their minds to see how their child’s brain has a different pattern of preference in using learning modalities to organize information.
I have found that people with hearing or auditory dominant preference respond very positively to background music while studying. In fact, restricting these students to a quiet study space actually has a negative impact on them staying in their optimal learning zone. To address this topic, I recently posted http://optikodes.com/optisensory-learning/music-studying/
You might find it of interest to have your students take the free assessment and see the pattern of perference and whether or not the hearing/auditory modality is one of their dominant 3 learning modalities.
It seems obvious that listening to one’s favorite band or recording artist is not conducive to better learning as this distracts the brain from being able to focus on the subject matter at hand, but background classical or ambient music or theta, alpha or beta sounds do seem to support more focus and energy for improved study.
My option is based on 14 years of work with students who struggle with traditional teaching methods.