Improving Validity
Although it would be very difficult and expensive it could be possible to take the study outside the laboratory to increase the ecological validity of the study. You could monitor the participants while they are learning for something at home and while they are playing their own music in their rooms. They could then be tested unknowingly at school by one of their reachers.
However, even if these changes were made, the results would probably still stay the same. It has been proved before by numerous studies done by different scientists that music does help when trying to learn. This is why students are encouraged to listen to wordless music when revising for exams.
These changes would also help improve participant reactivity if they are studied in a familiar environment. It would give them a sense of security and the need to look ‘cool’ is not needed anymore and there is no extra pressure put on them to learn because they don’t have the feeling they are being examined.
So, these changes could actually change the results slightly if only with a few participants. It might be found that there is higher recall in both conditions though but the difference may still stay the same.
Reliability
The study is very easy to replicate as there is many references to other studies similar to it. Also because the study is quite simple in itself and very cheap to do there are very rarely any problems in recreating it for different purposes.
One possible confounding variable was introduced by the fact that there were four researchers in the room at the time of the study and they all knew the hypotheses. They may have tried give the participants help in recalling the words by giving hints and clues so that the results were more conclusive. This may have led to unreliable comparisons between conditions.
As the study was a laboratory experiment it meant the researchers had good control over the study. The words that were chosen were all unambiguous so the participants would not have interpreted them in different ways. Also the test had been severely standardised. The words were shown on an over head projector so they were all looking at the same thing when learning was taking place. Also the testing was completed in the same room and at the same time of day for each condition so the participants were not feeling more tired in one condition than the other.
Improving reliability
The only possible way to improve reliability was to keep researcher contact to a minimum or have a person in the room that was unaware of the hypothesis so they couldn’t alter the study in any way. This would be difficult though because once they are in the room it does become quite obvious what the study is about.
This could be controlled for by using an outside civilian to be the one person giving the participants instructions on what they have to do. There could be one person chosen for each condition so that they don’t guess what the study is about.
Even if these changes did increase the reliability of the study the only difference they might make to the results is to decrease the differences found between the two conditions.
Implications of the study
Studies of this type have been performed many times before, most notably that of Godden and Baddeley. Our research provides support for their findings. They also found that there was an increase in recall when the learning and recalling had taken in place in the same environment. Even though there study was a bit more extreme (their study was conducted under water whereas ours was just whether music was playing or not) the results still have some relevance to what we found.
The findings also replicate those of Aggleton and Waskett where recall was higher when a smell was present. They also did a replication of Godden and Baddeley and found that participants can recall more when presented with something familiar to work to.
During the study there were some implications with the music being played to the participants. The apparatus we had did not allow the music to go very loud and there were some complaints from the participants that they could not even hear the music. So if this was changed there could be a significant increase in the difference between the two conditions.
Although the results did not show significant differences between the two conditions they still supported previous studies.
Generalisation of Findings
An opportunity sample was taken from Hills Road Sixth Form College. Although the participants were not picked randomly they were randomly assigned to each condition. The participants were picked in a relatively unbiased way which means that is should be possible to generalise to those that got to Hills Road.
Most of the participants used were of middle or upper class and were all reasonably intelligent and between the ages of 16 and 18. It could be true to say that participants at another school may have shown different levels of recall. This means that it may be wrong to generalise the results to the whole population.
Application of the study to everyday life
The results from our study on cued recall suggest that people do recall more when learning and recalling when there are similar cues present while both have occurred. This implies that if you are to learn something while listening to a particular song then you are more likely to recall when that same song is still playing. So when you revise for a particular subject it could be made much easier if the conditions in which you are learning stay the same when you are needed to recall that information.
