Oct 16, · @universityofky posted on their Instagram profile: “Like her sticker says, “Find your people.” College is a great place to do just that. Tag “your ” We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow blogger.com more The Effects of Music on a Student's Schoolwork. Today’s teens find it hard to resist listening to music while doing homework. Those who choose to listen while they study could see grades dip as a result. Teens need to choose wisely if they decide to listen to music and study at the same time. Soothing music
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Listening to music for relaxation is common among students to counter the effects of stress or anxiety while completing difficult academic tasks. Some studies supporting this technique have shown that background music promotes cognitive performance while other studies have shown that listening to music while engaged in complex cognitive tasks can impair performance.
This study focuses on the impact different genres of music, played at different volume levels, have on the cognitive abilities of college students completing academic tasks.
Many students listen to music to alleviate the emotional effects of stress and anxiety when engaged in complex cognitive processing, such as studying for a test, completing homework assignments, or while reading and writing.
This practice is so common that it would be beneficial for college students to understand the role that music plays on cognitive performance. Research demonstrating the effects of music on performance is well documented, but have shown ambiguous evidence on this matter.
However, with the plethora of music genres available to music listeners, it is important to understand how different types of music impact performance. Additionally, very few studies address the interaction between the intensity or volume of the music played and its effect on cognitive processing.
The present study aims to understand the effect of listening to different genres of music played at different volume levels on cognitive task performance. Many students choose to listen to a preferred genre of music when they study or do their homework without understanding the potential harmful effects of such practice. A study conducted by Smith and Morris addressed this distraction effects of background television on homework performance by studying the effects of sedative and stimulative music.
The study focused on the influence these two distinct genres of music have on performance, anxiety, and concentration. Distraction effects of background television on homework performance had to indicate their preferred genre and were requested to repeat a set of numbers backwards while listening to either the stimulative, sedative, or no music. The results indicated that participants performed worse while listening to their preferred type of music.
Additionally, in the no music condition, participants performed best. These results indicate that a preferred type of music can serve as a distracting factor when one is engaged in a cognitively demanding task perhaps due to the fact that less cognitive resources are available when the attention is drawn to the lyrics, emotions, and memories that such music can evoke.
Participants who listened to sedative music performed better than participants who listened to simulative music and worse than those who listened to no music at all. These results indicated that stimulative music is a stronger distractor and obstructs cognitive processing more than sedative music does. The influence of music on cognitive performance has also been linked to personality types.
A study conducted by Furnham and Bradley illustrated pop music as a distracter on the cognitive performance of introverts and extraverts. Distraction effects of background television on homework performance predicted that extraverts would outperform introverts in the presence of music. The participants were required to perform two cognitive tasks: a memory test with both an immediate and a delayed recall and a reading comprehension test. The two tasks would be completed in the pop music condition as well as in silence.
The results determined that immediate recall on the memory test was severely impaired for both introverts and extraverts when the pop music was played. In the delayed recall component of the memory test, introverts showed significantly poorer recall than did extraverts in the pop music condition as well as introverts in the silent condition.
Overall, the researchers determined that pop music served as a distractor for the cognitive performance of both extraverts and introverts; however, introverts seemed to be most affected.
Studies involving noise as a distraction have demonstrated the same ambiguous results regarding their effect on cognitive processing as studies involving background music. Dobbs, Furnham, and McClelland conducted a study that tested the effect of distracters, specifically background noise and music, on cognitive tasks for introverts and extraverts.
The researchers hypothesized that performance, for both introverts and extraverts, would be worse in the presence of music and noise than it would be in silence; specifically, distraction effects of background television on homework performance, for all the cognitive tasks, performance would diminish in the presence of background noise, improve with only background music, and be optimal in silence.
The findings supported their predictions and showed that cognitive performance in silence was better than performance with background music, which in turn was better than performance with background noise. In contrast, a study conducted by Poolmonitored the distracting effects of background television on homework performance and did not find any significant impairment on homework assignments when students were distracted by television while working on those assignments. These findings indicate that background noise, just like background music impacts cognitive performance in ways that have not been fully understood by researchers.
A study conducted by Hallman, Price, and Katsarou, supported this argument. In fact, they tested the effect of calming and relaxing music on arithmetic and memory performance tests in children ranging from ages ten to twelve. They found better performance on both tasks in the calming and relaxing music condition when compared with a no-music condition.
Although these data did not find that calming music enhanced performance, one might imply that this type of music can provide a soothing environment that puts students at ease, facilitating cognitive processing. The present study considers the effects of two different types of music at varying intensities on cognitive task performance and compared them to tasks performed in silence.
It was predicted that tasks performed in silence would yield better results than tasks performed both in the soft music and the loud music conditions, demonstrating that music is a distracter to cognitive performance.
Additionally, performance scores were expected to be significantly lower in the presence of loud music at a high intensity, suggesting that both the type of music and the volume at which the music is played are contributors to the distracting effect of music. Finally, performance was predicted to be significantly higher in the presence of soft music compared to loud music.
Thirty-two undergraduate students twenty-five females, seven malesranging in age from 20 to 41 years from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County UMBC at Shady Grove participated in this study. All students participated on a voluntary basis.
This study used five different arithmetic tests to measure cognitive performance Appendix A. The tests distraction effects of background television on homework performance of 20 different operations: 5 multiplication, 5 division, 5 addition, and 5 subtraction problems.
The order of operations was randomized throughout the tests. No question involved operations with more than a three-digit number. The five tests were similar in difficulty. The study was conducted in rooms assigned by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County UMBC at Shady Grove. Participants were given informed consent forms to fill out at the beginning of the experiment and a research participation credit sheet. A repeated-measure design was used in this study. All thirty-two participants were exposed to all five conditions.
The researcher explained to participants that music would be played while they solved the questions on the tests. The volume at each music condition was adjusted as the experiment progressed. The participants were asked to solve five arithmetic tests with twenty different questions on each test, distraction effects of background television on homework performance. The first test was conducted in the soft music condition at low intensity Test 1- SM-LOdistraction effects of background television on homework performance, and the second test, in the loud music condition at low intensity Test 2-LM-LO.
The third test was performed in complete silence Test 3- SIL. The fourth and fifth tests were conducted in soft music and loud music conditions, respectively, distraction effects of background television on homework performance, both at high volume intensity Test 4-SM-HI and Test 5 LM-HI.
The participants were allowed sixty seconds to complete each test. There was a twenty second waiting period between each test. The participants were not allowed to use a calculator or any other electronic device to complete the questions on the tests. This study was conducted in a repeated-measured design; therefore, a paired sample t-test was used for the analysis. An alpha level of. The independent variable was the type of music played at two different levels of intensity: high intensity and low intensity.
The dependent variable was the performance score, which was measured in terms of accurate answers obtained in each of the tests. The tests were not graded for completion but for accuracy only. The present study sought to demonstrate the impact of different genres of music played at different volume levels on cognitive performance. In accordance with the first hypothesis, participants performed better in silence than they did in any music conditions.
The findings were also in agreement with the second hypothesis. They demonstrated that the performance was significantly worse in the presence of loud music at high intensity. Contrary to the third hypothesis, however, there was no significant difference between the type of music that was played and performance scores, distraction effects of background television on homework performance. The scores were not significantly higher in the soft music versus the loud music condition.
Interestingly, there was no difference when the scores from the soft music at high intensity were compared to scores from the loud music at high intensity.
These results seem to parallel those of Smith and Morris In their study, they also found that participants performed better on a cognitive processing test while listening to no music than they did while listening to either stimulating or sedative music. They determined that performance is impaired with music and optimized with no music. However, their study revealed that participants performed significantly better while listening to sedative music than they did while listening to stimulating music, distraction effects of background television on homework performance, whereas the current experiment found no significant difference in test scores between the loud music and soft music conditions.
The third hypothesis suggested that performance would be better in the soft music condition when compared to the loud music condition because it was believed that classical music would provide a positive, soothing, and comfortable environment for the participants due to its relaxing tone that will facilitate information processing.
However, distraction effects of background television on homework performance, that hypothesis was not supported by the results; it is important to note that the overall performance was significantly lower in the loud music at high intensity.
Based on these results, the presence of lyrics and the consistent use of louder instruments, such as drums, bass and, electric guitar to the heavy metal rock music can be seen as reasons for its distracting effects.
Interestingly, while the findings of this study revealed that it is the intensity of the music rather than the type of music that matters the most when it comes to cognitive performance, it is still noteworthy to point out that scores were significantly higher when participants completed the tests in the silence condition.
Through this process, it can be implied that it is easier to process information in the presence of a minimal level of distraction. It can be implied that distraction effects of background television on homework performance should not listen to any music or allow any auditory disturbance while studying to obtain maximum performance level.
Students should strive to study and learn in an environment such as the library or a private study room that is as quiet as possible, especially when the material requires higher cognitive processing. The sample size was the major limitation of this study. Although two of the predictions were supported with this sample, large samples could have provided more reliable significances that could be generalized to the college student population. Due to the limited availability of participants, this study was conducted in a repeated-measured design, which could also be a limiting factor.
The sequence in which the tests were given was not randomized throughout the experiment; as such, learning effects could account for the improvement in later tests as the study progressed. Future research should strive to change the sequence in which the tests are administered to guarantee that the results obtained are those of the treatment effects and to eliminate or reduce possible learning effects. The design of the room could also be another limitation to this experiment.
Where participants were seated in the room could have had an effect on how the music was heard. Hence, for participants sitting closer to the speakers, the music was louder than those who were sitting on the other side of the room. This variance in volume level may have either positively or negatively affected the results. Although, some of the results from this study showed that the arithmetic problems were a sufficient tool to assess cognitive performance; however, they may have been too simple for distraction effects of background television on homework performance on the collegiate level to perform.
Besides, there were no mathematical base level assessments conducted prior to the study. Participants with stronger skills could have had a biased advantage, whereas those with lower mathematical skills would have had a biased disadvantage. Future research should plan to design more complex cognitive processing tests, such as memory tests or reading comprehension questions from standardized tests like the GRE or the SAT. Results from the current study demonstrated how important it is to consider the effects of distracting music on cognitive performance.
It was shown that the volume plays a crucial role and could be more important than the type of music played, distraction effects of background television on homework performance. However, data from this study has demonstrated that silence seems to be the best environment to maximize performance when engaging in cognitive activity.
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, time: 3:57The Effects of Music on a Student's Schoolwork | Education - Seattle PI
In contrast, a study conducted by Pool (), monitored the distracting effects of background television on homework performance and did not find any significant impairment on homework assignments when students were distracted by television while working on those assignments Feb 29, · Negative effects include a need for instant gratification, loss of patience. A number of the survey respondents who are young people in the under age group—the central focus of this research question—shared concerns about changes in human attention and depth of discourse among those who spend most or all of their waking hours under the influence of hyperconnectivity Oct 16, · @universityofky posted on their Instagram profile: “Like her sticker says, “Find your people.” College is a great place to do just that. Tag “your ”
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