An investigation into the Mozart Effect.

Authors Avatar

Alex Harlock

Psychology Unit 3 – Coursework

An investigation into the Mozart Effect

Introduction

Background research

Modern technology is increasing at an amazing rate, everyone is trying to keep up and have cutting edge equipment. This is very much important in school systems as well as other areas of life. With technology now being such a dominant factor in classrooms, teachers are doing all they can to incorporate technology into their teaching. This includes playing music during tests. Teachers may see this as a way to relax students and reduce anxiety, thus helping their test performance.

There is research however, that states to achieve maximal scores on a test, studying should be done with the same cues present as during testing. For example, if the student listened to Mozart’s 5th concerto whilst studying, he may recall the facts better during the exam if the same piece of music is played. According to the encoding specificity principle of memory, (Thompson & Tulving, 1970) the most effective retrieval cues at the time of recall are cues that contain information that was processed at the time the “to be remembered material” was studied. Therefore, for the music to help the student during testing, it should be played during studying also. This brings up the issue of whether or not studying with music effects test performance. Many students feel that studying with music helps.

 Frances H. Rauscher discovered that performance on spatial reasoning tests improved after the participants listened to Mozart as opposed to a relaxation tape or silence. He first demonstrated the correlation between music and learning in an experiment in 1993. His experiments indicated that a 10-minute dose of Mozart could temporarily boost intelligence. Groups of students were given intelligence tests after listening to silence, relaxation tapes, or Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. He found that after silence, the average IQ score was 110, and after the relaxation tape, scores rose a point. After listening to Mozart, however, the scores jumped to 119. Even students who did not like the music still had an increased score on the IQ test. Rauscher hypothesized that listening to complex, non-repetitive music, like Mozart, may stimulate the relevant parts of the brain into thinking.

 McFarland and Kennison (1987) however assume through their studies that the right hemisphere of the brain processes music. They found that participants require greater effort to successfully learn a task with the presence of music. Therefore, according to their study, music does more harm than good when studying. McFarland and Hanna (1990) found that music inhibited initial learning in a spatial task. Again showing that playing music while studying is more damaging than helpful on test performances.

Research seems to show that music during studying inhibits learning. Is this true even if there is music present during testing?

Join now!

Rationale

This experiment will show if there is a relationship between music present during studying and test scores. It will also exhibit if there is a correlation between studying with environmental cues and having the same cues present during recall. It will show how the encoding specificity principle relates to music being present during studying. The experiment is neither damaging nor demoralizing to the participants; therefore it is sound on ethical and humanitarian grounds. If the experiment does show music to have a beneficial effect on learning, it would be well worth the time and effort spent in ...

This is a preview of the whole essay