Do Different Music Tempos Affect the Performance of Students - Research Proposal Example

DO DIFFERENT MUSIC TEMPOS AFFECT THE ARITHMETIC AND WRITING PERFORMANCE OF COLLEGE This study is designed to examine how different music tempos affect the arithmetic and writing performance of college students. Participants (N=28, 56% being female) completed three creative writing tests and two arithmetic tests while listening to classical music, no music, and lyrical music. Writing and arithmetic performance in the no music condition was slightly better than in lyrical music and classical music conditions; this difference was however not significant (p=.92). In future researches, this paper recommends that researchers should equalize the tests difficulties before carrying out a similar experiment. Do different music tempos affect the arithmetic and writing performance of college students? Introduction A quick observation of students in campus, especially during exams periods paints a picture of students with headphones on while writing a paper or reading a book. Most often, the music tunes that they might be listening to usually range from slow, lyrical, instrumental, to dance, heavy metal, or loud music. Over the years a lot of debates have been initiated with regards to whether or not studying while listening to music was disadvantageous or beneficial; however, none of those debates have been able to yield any definite answer; is a given tempo of music more distracting than others? Is music in general a distraction to learner? Numerous researches have been conducted in this regard, specifically, to test whether different music tempos or different types of music have some impact on student’s cognitive performance, such as writing, memory, arithmetic, and comprehension. For instance, a study by Furnham & Stephenson (2007) found that lullaby-like, or soft music had the effect of improving people’s cognitive ability and that high tempo or more upbeat music has the effect of decreasing people’s cognitive ability. In that research by Furnham and Stephenson (2007), 118 elementary level students were given four different tasks, which entailed free recall, mental arithmetic, reading comprehension, and verbal reasoning, to complete. The results suggested that students listening to less upbeat or soft music performed better than the students who were listening to high tempo music. Thus, the study concluded that students perform tasks better when listening to relaxing, soft music such as low tempo classical music. These findings cloud possibly be explained by the fact that calming, soft music relaxed the participants and assisted them in calming their nerves. The slow tempo, relaxing, and calming music was not more of a distracter as the high tempo, upbeat music; it did not interfere with the participants’ concentration levels. The music, instead, helped them remain focused; in fact, it helped them block off any other common distractions such as whispers or pencil tapings by other participants. Another study by Furnham also found that music that was less upbeat, had fewer beats per minute, and was not fast, positively impacted the performance of participants with regards to prose recall, writing, mental arithmetic, as well as comprehension tasks (Furnham & Strbac, 2002). A similar study in 2007 by Cassidy and MacDonald found out that fast, high, aggressive tempo-high arousal music, had more negative impact on the participants cognitive ability performance compared to low arousal, slower, relaxing music. This study by Cassidy & MacDonald (2007) examined randomly selected undergraduate students who were assigned in four different study conditions: silence, slow tempo music, high tempo music, and background noise. The study asked the participants to complete five different tasks that were related to information recall. The results of this study indicated that there were significant differences in the ability to recall information between noise conditions and silent conditions. In fact, participants that completed the five tasks in the silent condition performed far much better. Fast high tempo music appeared to be detrimental and distractive to the participants recall ability. It is clear that in all these studies that no music or slow music conditions positively impacted the participants’ cognitive abilities when performing various prescribed tasks including reading comprehension, writing performance, as well as mental arithmetic performance. They, therefore, suggest that music has an effect on students’ cognitive ability, and the negativity or positivity of these effects is dependent on the music tempos (Caldwell & Riby, 2007). A 2005 study by Beaman on the effect of irrelevant noise on short term memory also found similar results. According to Beaman (2005), the term irrelevant noise referred to the noise that had no relevance to the task that was being undertaken and was meant to be a distracter. Beaman in this study, as opposed to previously mentioned studies, tested noise intensity as a distracter and not the types or tempos of music. His study asserted that noise intensity has no significant impact on the cognitive ability of adults; however, a change in the intensity of noise acted as a distracter. On the other hand, children as opposed to adults are more easily distracted by irrelevant noise; in fact, noise intensity affects them. There other numerous studies that have been carried out regarding the effect of noise on learning performance. In 2013, Goldenberg, Floyd, & Moyer also conducted a research on the effect of television noise on a person’s reading comprehension performance; the test used television noise as a distracter, and participants performed reading comprehension tests. The results of this study suggested that participants did significantly well in a silent environment as opposed to in an environment with television noise. These studies, therefore, show that irrelevant noise negatively impacts on people’s cognitive abilities. Zimmer & Brachulis-Raymond (1978) carried out a study that found no significance for music conditions. In this study, participating students were put in four different music conditions as were given tasks that entailed verbal memory, memory, and arithmetic tests. The four conditions included popular music, no music control condition, conversation style condition, and industrial noise condition. The study found that there were no significant effects of music on the participants’ cognitive ability. This was explained by the fact that student were somewhat familiar or used to the noise distraction since they used to hear them in their day-to-day learning settings; as such, they were able to block them out. There seems to be somewhat conflicting findings amongst the studies mentioned above; this is what has prompted our current study of trying to ascertain whether different music tempos affect the arithmetic and writing performance of college students. Thesis This study expects that music will have a significant effect in performance on writing and arithmetic tasks. The fact that music of different tempos can be distracting as the studies previously mentioned have shown, this study expects that the performance or scores of participants in writing and arithmetic tasks will be highest in no music conditions, higher in low tempo, classical music conditions, and lowest in high tempo, lyrical music conditions. In order to test this hypothesis, an experiment involving a significant random sample of 28 college students was conducted and their performance in writing and arithmetic tests in three different conditions was tested. The participants completed three creative writing tests and two arithmetic tests while listening to classical music, no music, and lyrical music conditions. Method Participants Twenty-eight (28) from the University of Kansas volunteered to participate in the experiment, 44% of them were male while 56% were female. Their ages ranged between 17 and 20 years; they were adults. The participants were 40% African Americans, and 60% Caucasian, and their GPA ranged from 2.5 to 3.4, with an average of 2.8. Materials A laptop with external speakers was used to play music in one room; there were three different conditions; classical music, lyrical music, and no music condition-the control condition. Two songs that were currently popular on pop radio stations and amongst the students in campus were selected for the lyrical music condition. These songs were Katy Perry’s 2008 hit song “I kissed a girl”, and M.I.A’s 2007 hit song “Paper Planes”. These were high tempo upbeat songs that were very catchy and played for at least three minutes thirty seconds. With regards to the classical music condition, two songs were also chosen, Piano Sonata: II. Aria, and Piano Concerto No. 24: II. Larghetto, both of which played for approximately five minutes; these songs were slow tempo, and lullaby-like songs (Cassity, Henley, & Markley, 2007). The three separate writing tests and the two arithmetic tests were administered. These tests were gathered from a SAT preparation site, http://majortests.com. Each of the tests took about 6 minutes; the arithmetic tests had 5 multiple-choice questions. Questions on the writing tests were based on reviewing reading from two authors, particularly with regards to their views, actions of characters within a given passage, as well as word definition through context clues. Apart from these tests, a simple, short questionnaire was administered to all the participants to gather information about their GPA, ethnicity, gender, and age. Procedure The participants were each given a random number which their used as a marker for their information sheets and helped matching their test results and their information sheets. The participants were that assigned into random groups, three groups. Each of the three groups experienced the three different conditions in the same order; from silent, to lyrical, then to classical. The order of the tests were however changed and randomized in order to ensure that the test difficulty was equalized. The order of music conditions, however, remained the same for each session; this was to help minimize the carry-over effects of the music, since the beat or lyrics of the music could easily remain in the participant’s head. Results This study had opined that the participants will report highest test scores in the silent or no music condition, than in either the classical-slow tempo, or lyrical-high tempo music condition. Further, the expectation was that participants will get higher tests scores both in the writing and arithmetic tests in the slow tempo-classical music condition as opposed to in the high-tempo lyrical music condition. In order to determine the existence of a significant difference in the mean scores of the writing and arithmetic tests taken in the three different music conditions, a within-subjects, two way ANOVA-analysis of variance on the impacts of music on writing and arithmetic performance ability was conducted. The results analysis indicated that music in general had no significant effects on the performance of the participants in the writing and the arithmetic tests, F (1, 21), p=0.92. Further, the mean scores of the participants across the three different music conditions were within 0.1 of each other. When carrying out a within-subject, two ways ANOVA, a significant effect with regards to test difficulty was found. This could explain why there was no significant effect of music on the performance of participants in the writing and the arithmetic tests. Figure 1: Mean test scores comparison of the three conditions References Beaman, C. (2005). Auditory distraction from low intensity noise; A review of the consequences for learning and workplace environments. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19(8), 1041–1064. Caldwell, G. N., & Riby, L. M. (2007). The effects of music exposure and own genre preference on conscious and unconscious cognitive processes: A pilot ERP study. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 16, 992–996. Cassidy, G., & MacDonald, R. (2007). The effectof background music and background noise on the task performance of introverts and extraverts. Psychology of Music., 35(3), 517–537. Cassity, H. D., Henley, T. B., & Markley, R. P. (2007). The Mozart Effect: Musical phenomenon or musical preference? A more ecologically valid reconsideration. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 34, 13–17. Furnham, A., & Stephenson, R. (2007). Musical distracters, personality type and cognitive performance in school children. Psychology of Music, 35(3), 403–420. Furnham, A., & Strbac, L. (2002). Music is as distracting as noises: The differential distraction of background music and noise on the cognitivetest performance of introverts and extraverts. Ergonomics, 45(3), 203–217. Goldenberg, M. A., Floyd, A. H. L., & Moyer, A. (2013). No Effect of a Brief Music Intervention on Test Anxiety and Exam Scores in CollegeUndergraduates. Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, 10(1), 1539–8714. Zimmer, J. W., & Brachulis-Raymond, J. (1978). Effects of distracting stimuli on complex information processing. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 46(3), 791–794. Read More

 

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