Background Music and Learning Enhancement

Hallam, S. & Godwin, C. (2000). The effects of background music on primary school pupils' performance on a writing task. Paper presented at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, University of Wales, Cardiff, 7-9 September, 2000.

Research on the effects of background music has a long history. Early work was not embedded within a theoretical framework, was often poorly conceptualized and overall the findings were equivocal. This paper sets out a model for understanding earlier findings and describes a recent study. 54 children aged 10-11 were asked to write an exciting story while listening to either calming, arousing or no background music and to complete a short questionnaire exploring their perceptions of the music and its effects. The stories were graded by two independent judges on a range of criteria including structure, level of description, detail and clarity in the writing and the extent to which the story flowed, created suspense, excitement, held the attention or was very violent. The type of music appeared to have little effect on well practiced writing skills but had a significant effect on the quality of the creative writing. Writing an `exciting' story was accomplished better when `calming' music was playing. Most children were inaccurate in their assessment of these effects. There was also a tendency for the exciting music to elicit stories that were more violent in nature. The findings of these studies are discussed in relation to the proposed model.

Hallam, S. & Price, J. (1998). Can the use of background music improve the behaviour and academic performance of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties? British Journal of Special Education, 25(2), 88-91.

Historically, there have been many claims regarding the beneficial effects of music on behaviour and development, but there has been little empirical work to verify them. This research studied the effects of providing background music in the classroom on the behaviour and performance in mathematical tasks of ten children attending a school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, who exhibited a high frequency of disruptive behaviour. There was a significant improvement in behaviour and mathematics performance for all the children. The effects were particularly marked for those whose problems were related to constant stimulus-seeking and over-activity. Improvements were also observed in improved co-operation and a reduction in aggression.

Brown, R. (1986) Suggestive-Accelerative learning and Teaching in Special Education. The Journal of the Society for Accelerative Learning and Teaching, 11, 1, 13-22.

Brown found that when she read a story to active music, in the Accelerated Learning Active Concert style, to both active and passive music in the same style, and, finally to no music, that the results indicated a statistically positive difference in retention between the music and the no-music groups. There was no statistical difference between the two types of music groups.

Furnham, A. & Bradley, A. (1997). Music while you work: The differential distraction of background music on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11, 445-455.

The current study looked at the distracting effects of "pop music" on introverts' and extraverts' performance on various cognitive tasks. It was predicted that there would be a main effect for music and an interaction effect with introverts performing less well in the presence of music than extraverts. Ten introverts and ten extraverts were given two tests (a memory test with immediate and delayed recall and a reading comprehension test), which were completed, either while being exposed to pop music, or in silence. The results showed that there was a detrimental effect on immediate recall on the memory test for both groups when music was played and two of the three interactions were significant. After a 6-minute interval the introverts who had memorized the objects in the presence of the pop music had a significantly lower recall than the extraverts in the same condition and the introverts who had observed them in silence. The introverts who completed a reading comprehension task when music was being played also performed significantly less well than these two groups. These findings have implications for the study habits of introverts when needing to retain or process complex information.