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Testing for the effects of Music on Reading Comprehension Skills under Different Music Environments
References
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Testing the Effects of Music on Reading Comprehension Skills under Different Music Environments
The influence of background music on working cognitive memory has been a debate and has become a subject that has gotten many psychological researches involved. At the same time, thanks to the advancement of technology, we now can listen to music almost wherever we may end up going. Background music while studying has become an almost every day task for students. Many students listen to music while they study. Do we want our students listening to music while they study?
School achievement clearly predicts future educational attainment (Savolainen, Ahonen, Aro, Tolvanen and Hlopainen, 2008). As we see on a daily basis, this habit is well accepted in most institutions and there is nothing that is being done to ban it, not to mention the fact there is no research with data that would back such arguments whether it’s for this habit of against it. (Darrow, Standley and Swedberg, 2007, p. 25) state in their study that according to (Tucker, 1981) “it is widely believed that music learning, music reading and/or, music participation enhance academic achievement, especially reading and math.”
Other researchers have measured the influence of background music on cognitive performance (Furnham and Allass, 1999), however that is considered as background noise which is playing from a stereo possibly located somewhere around the subject. Our research is measuring their comprehension abilities while the subject is listening to music with their headphones on.
To understand the affects of background music on reading comprehension we must be able to measure their comprehension and then control the environment with music.
The affects of music on concentration while driving has also been looked at to see if music could possibly have an effect on fatigue in which some drives might experience. (Gilad, Ronen and Shinar, 2007).
It is important to look further into the details of this habit that is little by little taking over most college students. Why would anyone not like listening to their favorite music while studying? However, will this practice hurt the individuals at the end of their study sessions by interfering with their comprehension skills while they read?
Though a number of studies have researched similar ideas, such as memory recall while listening to music, reading comprehension measurements while listening to music and while in complete silence, they haven’t so far tested for music in which the individual might find motivating to study in.
Reading in many ways is like driving, and includes many tasks that the individual must complete to comprehend the material well. Music could in a sense make you more alert just like it does to drives who listen to music when they drive.
Over a relatively short period of time, a reader progresses from laborious word by word decoding to quickly and accurately understanding the constructing meaning contained in sentences, paragraphs, and entire passages (Collins and Levy, 2008). According to (Gilad, Ronen and Shinar, 2007), psychological fatigue, on the contrary, is a subjective experience of disinclination to continue performing the task at hand. Therefore if music takes away the individuals focus away from the fatigue, it might actually do less harm than originally thought.
Once we take this important issue in account, we can then draw a closer line to the conclusion and expand our understanding of this habit and what it can and can’t do for the students.
This research will be similar to current researches in many ways, yet will have other ways to measuring for accuracy. It is our goal to only look at the short-term effects of music on reading comprehension. There are studies out in which the researchers have measured cognition between children who were raised in areas where the traffic noise and aircraft noise was high vs. children who lived in quite areas (Stanfeld, 2005). We are also staying away from measuring memory by making the passage available for the subjects to go back to whenever they might need to.
“Measuring for phonological codes in reading comprehension has been the subject of investigation for many years” (Boyle and Coltheart, 1996). As stated by this very article the answers to component which are essential for short-term memory has still remained unanswered.
Throughout this study, it is predicted for the individuals who listen to music to have a lower reading comprehension level than the other two controls. The second group in which the individuals get to listen to their own favorite music is predicted to do better than the last group in which we choose the music, however worst than the group who do the task in silence.
It is also predicted that the music which is playing in the subject’s ear, whether it is their choice of music or ours will interfere with their comprehension and delay their understating of materials within the context of the passage.
For example, the subjects might need to read the same sentence(s) more than once in order to comprehend the full meaning of the author.
By confirming this hypothesis, one can decide on the study skills he or she might want to get used to. Once we reach our conclusion in this study, it will implicate the very fact that music is good but only to a certain degree such as driving. However it is an unnecessary tool for students to use while they study. If the comprehension levels are lower when the individual is listening to music, it will set the ground for major studies to follow and possibly making this an epidemic. This study is a very small step in summarizing and concluding this issue, and there hasn’t been a significant amount of evidence based on the research done. However, we wish to confirm our hypothesis as far as the effects of music on reading comprehension.
Although the majority of research show a strong correlation between music and cognitive tasks, and even succeeding and doing better in special education students, they fail to control for music the is the choice of the subject.
This study was designed to investigate the correlation between individuals who listen to music while reading a passage and compare their comprehension levels to the subjects who read their passages in silence and compare those levels with subjects who read passages while listening to the music they have chosen as their favorite music which in many cases is a type of music that will motivate them.
Method
Participants
We will be using 60 participants for our study. We will use 20 participants for each of the three conditions. The participants will be assigned to the randomly assigned conditions in sets of 5. We will have a total of 12 sets of participants, 4 sets per condition. We will randomly assign the conditions by writing each condition on pieces of paper, placing them in a bag, and drawing them out one by one. Our selection procedure is based on the qualification of being able to read English fluently and participants must be a Psychology 150 and/or 250 students whom will be notified by the school’s research management website also known as “Sona System” once our research methods are approved by the board. The participants will get credit for their participation. The credit authorization will be filled out by us, the researcher, and we will also list their credits on the Sona System.
Materials
The participants will be given a 5 page booklet, a pencil and a stop watch for their timing purposes. We will also be using a desktop PC if available in the research rooms or we will provide a laptop for the purposes of playing a CD and accessing the World Wide Web to find the participant’s music of choice. The participants in the conditions with music will be advised to bring their own headphones, and if for any reason they forget to bring their own, they will be given a headphone which they can keep at the end of the research session.
Procedures
Our research is measuring the level of reading comprehension of the participants based on three different conditions. Condition one involves no music, condition two involves listening
to music that has been chosen by the researcher and condition three involves the participants listening to the music of their choice. All conditions will require the participant to read the passage that is being provided to them. The participants will be given an introduction to what they will be doing.
This introduction will take just under one minute. They will be told about the booklet and the 10 questions which they will have to answer following reading the passage. We will tell the participants that they can go back to the passage whenever they feel necessary, since this is NOT a memory research. They will be informed that they can use any way they are most comfortable with, whether it be search and destroy method, in which the participant can read the questions first one by one then going through the passage to look for answers or they can read the passage then start to answer the questions and go back if they needed to.
In all three conditions, the participants will be given a total of 8 minutes to complete reading the passage and answering the questions. They will also be informed that they may NOT guess on any questions. If they can’t find it, they will have to move on or if they don’t have enough time to finish, they will have to leave the questions blank.
The researcher will ask the participant to place his/her pencil on the table and STOP after the 8 minutes has lapsed. For the participants in which the condition requires listening to music we will provide ear phones which are either connected to a PC in the research rooms or a laptop
which will be able to play a CD. For all participants we have decided to use Classical Jazz by Sade and the song is called “The Sweetest Taboo”.
The participants will be given 1 minute to come up with the 5 songs of their choice in the condition in which the participant uses the music of their choice. We will then take an extra
minute to find one of their songs on the World Wide Web. They will then also be given the headphones along with their favorite music playing ON REPLAY for the duration of the 8 minutes.
The total duration for the experiment will take no more than 15 minutes. Once the participants are done with the passage, they will get debriefed and credit will be given to them for their class participation purposes.
Results
Within all the groups, the total number of participants was 56. There were 46 females and 10 males. There were 82% females and 18% males. The mean of their ages was 20. The median of their ages was 19 and the mode of their ages stood at 18. The standard deviation of the ages was calculated to be 4.692. The minimum age was of the participants was 18 and the maximum age was 50. The variance age of the groups was 22.015.
For Condition #1 in which we had No Music, we had 20 participants, which equaled to 35.7% of the total participants. For Condition #2 in which the participants listened to Jazz Music, we had 18 participants, which equaled to 32.15% of the total participants. For Condition #3 in which the participants chose their Own Music, we had 18 participants, which equaled to 32.15% of the total participants.
Over 75% of the scores were above the 50%tile rank and 27% of the scores were perfect. Also, 5% got zero questions right. The mean score was 6.59. The median score was 6 and the mode score was 10. The standard deviation of the scores was calculated to be 2.84.
The minimum score was 0 and the maximum score was 10. The scores ranged from 0 to 10. The variance of the scores was 8.065.
Between all of our participants 53.36% were freshman totaling 31 students, and 23.21% were sophomores, totaling 13 students. Also, 19.64% were juniors, totaling 11 student and 1.79% seniors totaling 1 student. From the whole participant pool, 46.43% of our subjects normally listened to music while studying which equals to 26 students.
A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was calculated on participants' ratings of reading comprehension scores. The independent variable was the music conditions in which the participants read the article under. The dependent variable was the measurement of reading comprehension based on their scores. The higher the score the higher the participant’s reading comprehension level. The analysis was significant, F(2, 55) = 35.98, p < 0.05. A post-hoc analysis showed that the participants in the No Music condition outperformed both the participants in the Jazz Music condition and Their Own Music condition; also there was a significant difference between the participants in Their Own Music condition and the Jazz Music Condition where the participants in Their Own Music condition outperformed the participants in Our Music Condition.
About the Author
Ardeshir Sadehkhou
California State University, Northridge
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
US $2.19
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