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“But I Study Much Better With My Music On”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 13, 2019

“But I Study Much Better With My Music On”

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You have, no doubt, heard of the “Mozart Effect.”

The short version is: “listening to Mozart makes you smarter!” (Translation: “Parents: run right out and by Mozart recordings for your children!”)

The longer version is: “in one study, children who listened to Mozart before they took a spatial reasoning test did better than those who didn’t. The effect lasted, at most, fifteen minutes.”

That initial study turned into several books, and several extravagant claims. In 1998, the governor of Georgia wanted the state budget to buy every child a classical music recording.

Plausible Extrapolation?

If listening to Mozart before a spatial reasoning test improves performance, then … just maybe … listening to music while I do my schoolwork will help me think better.

I know LOTS of teenagers who insist that this is true. Whenever I talk about brain research at schools, high-schoolers assure me quite passionately that they learn more with their music playing.

That’s a plausible claim. Let’s research it.

Perham and Currie tested this claim quite simply. They had adults take a reading comprehension test adapted from the SAT. Over headphones, they heard either…

…music they chose because they liked it (Frank Ocean, Katy Perry),

…music they didn’t like (thrash metal),

…music that didn’t have lyrics, or

…silence

What Perham and Currie find?

Quite clearly, these learners did their best thinking in silence.

More specifically, when they answered reading comprehension questions in silence, they averaged 61%. Listening to music without lyrics, they averaged a 55%. Music with lyrics — either likable-Katy Perry or disliked-thrash metal — led to a 38% average.

The drop from a 61% to a 38% should get everyone’s attention.

Here’s a straightforward summary for our students.

Would you like to increase your reading comprehension 20%?

TURN OFF THE MUSIC and read in silence.

Asking the Right (Narrow) Question

To sum up:

Perham and Currie’s study strongly suggests that listening to music with lyrics interferes with reading comprehension.

This study strongly suggests that listening to music during a task interferes with students’ creativity.

But, this study suggests that listening to upbeat music before a task increases creativity.

And, this study might — or might not — suggest that students who join band classes in high school improve in their ability to process language sounds … which might (or might not) have beneficial academic effects.

In other words: to understand the relationship between music and learning, we need to ask narrow, precise questions.

When students say “I study better with music because, Mozart Effect,” we can say:

a) we’ve got good research showing that’s not true,

and

b) we can’t extrapolate from very tentative Mozart findings to your homework.

One final point deserves emphasis.

I understand the desire to say: “students should study music because it helps them do this other thing better.”

I’d rather say: “everyone should make music, because it connects us to our humanity and to each other.”

Mozart or Frank Ocean or Thrash Metal. Bring it on…

Live Theater Boosts Student Knowledge and Tolerance
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October 12, 2018

Live Theater Boosts Student Knowledge and Tolerance

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Question: What’s the most potentially misleading kind of research?

Answer: Research that supports a position you REALLY want to believe.

For this reason, I try to be ferociously skeptical of research that sounds really wonderful to me.

live theater

In this case: I’ve been a theater guy my whole life. I acted in plays throughout high school and college. My first teaching job was as a theater director. As I write this post, I’m about to go to a play.

When I see research showing that attending live theater is good for students, I already believe it’s true. I’m completely certain.

For that very reason, I try as hard as I can to find flaws in the study’s method.

Here’s what I found…

Live Theater: Methods

Researcher Jay Greene and his team chose some high school classes at random to attend live plays, including Twelfth Night and Peter and the Starcatcher. They compared those classes to control group classes, and measured several variables:

Tolerance: how did students respond to statements like “people who disagree with my point of view bother me,” or “I think people can have different opinions about the same thing.”

“Social perspective taking”: how did they respond to questions like “How often do you try to figure out what motivates others to behave as they do?”

Content Knowledge: how well did they learn the play’s plot and vocabulary.

As best I can tell, the researchers made a good-faith effort to make comparisons as fair as possible.

In one case, for example, they sent two classes on the same bus to a college campus. Half the students got off the bus to see a live play, and the others went into the same building to see a movie version of that play.

It’s hard to imagine a fairer control group when measuring the effect of live theater.

Live Theater: the Results

Students filled out their questionnaires several weeks after they did (or didn’t) see the plays.

When they crunched the data, Greene’s team found impressive differences.

On all of these scales, students who saw live theater scored higher than those who didn’t. And, watching a movie version of the play that others saw didn’t have that effect. In fact, it didn’t have any effect.

To put that in other words:

Students who saw live theater were likelier to be open to other points of view.

They were likelier to think about another person’s perspective.

They were likelier to understand the events and the language of the play.

The stats methodology gets into the weeds here — they report their findings based on standard deviations and z scores — but the trend is clear: live theater matters. A lot.

Conclusions

I’m trying to be grimly skeptical here. But I have to say, I just might be convinced.

Given Greene’s conspicuous fairness, his obvious attempts to be as reasonable as possible, his honesty about the potential flaws in his method, it seems just possible that he’s on to something here.

One important point: this is the first study that looks directly at this question. We can never reach firm conclusions based on only one study.

But: as a place to start, this research seems quite persuasive.

Not only we theater people, but all teachers might come to believe that attending live theater helps students learn…and be good people.

 

Do Musicians Really Have Better Memories?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
February 05, 2018

Do Musicians Really Have Better Memories?

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musician memory

Here’s a provocative claim for you: “musicians have better memories than non-musicians.”

But, do we have research to support that claim?

According to a meta-analysis published back in October of 2017, the answer is: “mostly yes.”

What do we know about musician memory?

Reseachers in Padua, Italy examined 29 different memory studies, sorting them into categories of long-term, short-term, and working memory.

In all three categories, musician memory averaged higher on various tests than non-musician memory. (They defined “musician” as someone who had enrolled in a conservatory or music school, and “non-musician” as someone who had little musical training.)

The effect size was “small” for long-term memory, and “moderate” for short-term and working memory.

(For the stats pros in the house, Hedges’s g was 0.29 for LTM, 0.57 for STM, and 0.56 for WM.)

The Plot Thickens

Of course, the story gets more complex. After all, we have different ways of testing these memory skills.

So, for example, we might test people on their ability to remember musical tones. In that case, it’s not at all surprising that musicians have better memory.

But when we test their verbal ability, or their visuo-spatial ability, what do we find?

In long-term memory, it’s all the same. Musicians consistently have (slightly) higher scores than non-musicians.

For short-term memory and working memory, these tests matter. In verbal tests, musicians’ STM and WM still average higher, but not as much as overall. In visuo-spatial tests, the differences basically vanishes.

How to explain these differences?

It’s not surprising that music training might help with verbal capacities. Our ability to process and read language does depend significantly on our ability to process tone and rhythm.

However, music isn’t so directly related to processing of spatial information, and so might not provide enough training to make a difference.

How do we interpret these differences?

Before we conclude that music training causes better memory, we should consider an alternative explanation. Perhaps music requires better memory, and so only those with very good memory skills ever enroll in a conservatory.

If that explanation isn’t true, then we arrive at a surprising conclusion: just maybe it IS possible to train working memory.

Regular readers of this blog know that there’s a lot of skepticism about WM training programs. They’re often expensive and time consuming, and don’t consistently produce results outside of the psychology lab.

It would be thrilling to know that music lessons not only help people make music, but also boost this essential cognitive capacity.

At the same time, we should keep two cautions in mind.

First: it takes A LOT of music training to get into conservatory. People with WM difficulties just might not have that much extra time.

Second: this study doesn’t show that music training leads to greater learning of, say, math and reading. When we worry about students’ working memory, we typically want them to make greater progress in disciplines such as these.

Last Notes

These cautions aside, this study seems like wonderful news. Creating music is good for the soul. And, studying music just might be good for our memory systems as well.

The Potential Benefits of High School Music Classes
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 27, 2017

The Potential Benefits of High School Music Classes

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AdobeStock_66165135_Credit

Should 9th graders start music classes–even if they’ve never played an instrument before? Are there academic benefits to studying music? Is 9th grade too late a start to get those benefits? Should my school’s STEM program become a STEAM program?

A recent study by Adam T. Tierney offers some answers to these compelling questions.

The Short Version

Tierney & Co. followed 19 high school students who enrolled in a high school music ensemble, and compared them to 21 students at the same school who started a JROTC program.

These groups started off nicely matched in various academic and linguistic measures. However, at the end of 4 years, the group that had studied music improved in some suggestive ways.

First, the neural signatures of their response to speech changed meaningfully; oversimplifying a bit here, they were “more mature.”

Second, the musicians improved more than the JROTC participants in their ability to distinguish between and manipulate language sounds.

Reasons to be Excited

Tierney’s study gives us several reasons to perk right up.

For example: we’ve known for a long time that life-long musicians have these language processing benefits. Now we have good reason to think that even those who pick up an instrument later in life get them as well.

Another example: this study compares the musicians to the JROTC participants. That is, it does not compare them just to some random collection of non-musicians. Like these new musicians, the JROTC students had a highly disciplined practice schedule, had to function in a structured group, and so forth.

Because the study includes this “active control group,” we can be sure the results don’t come from–say–just being part of an organized school activity.

Most exciting: the students’ improvement in their ability to process language sounds.

This ability–called “phonemic awareness”–gets a lot of research attention, because it can predict success in several essential language skills: reading and writing, to name two.

We test phonemic awareness in many ways. For instance:

  • “Which one of these words does not rhyme with the others: bell, swell, full, tell.”
  • “Say the word ‘boat.’ Now, say that again without the ‘b’ sound.”
  • “How many syllables are there in the word ‘ventricle’?”

If music practice–even music practice begun in high school–can improve students’ phonemic awareness, it just might be able to help them do well in other courses where they have to process language–which is to say: all of them.

Reasons to Remain Calm

Tierney’s study is exciting, but we shouldn’t require all of our students to join band just yet. Here are a few important gaps in this research:

The students enrolled in music class improved their phonemic awareness, but Tierney didn’t measure if that improvement had any impact on, say, their performance in English class; or, perhaps, their ability to learn a new language. That effect is plausible, but not demonstrated here.

Also, Tierney & Co. measured two other linguistic abilities beyond phonemic awareness: phonological memory, and rapid naming. They found no statistically significant difference between the music students and the JROTC students in these two measures.

If one measure out of three shows improvement, that’s good. But it’s not a home run.

And, a point about the research methodology here. These students chose to join band or JROTC; they were not–in the “gold standard” of research–randomly assigned to do so. (Of course: there are many good reasons to let students choose, rather than forcing them into one group or another.)

The differences we see, therefore, might not have to do with the experience of band vs. JROTC. Instead, they might be differences in the kind of 9th grader who wants to be in band vs. the kind of 9th grader who wants to be in JROTC.

In other words: perhaps those band students were always a little better at discriminating among sounds, which is why they were drawn to music in the first place. Tierney’s team did try to rule that out with their various pre-study measures, but perhaps those differences are not captured by the tests we have.

We just don’t know. (Or, better said: we don’t “know” in the way that scientists want to know things.)

A Final Point

I understand why people are attracted to this argument: “students should do art because it makes them better at other things we do in school.”

I am more attracted to this argument: “students should make art because it’s an essential expression of human joy, sorrow, love, solitude, fun, reverence, and hope.”

In other words: I don’t think schools should foster art because it makes people better at STEM. I think schools should champion art because it makes people better at being people.