Turn off the Music or risk getting lower grades

Headphones and earphones are now so ubiquitous we hardly take notice of them, but future historians may well regard these micro speakers as the beginning of an all encompassing synergy between humans and electronics. So many people cannot leave their homes for a short trip without their ears being plugged, while longer journeys certainly require the construction of an extended playlist, lest sounds of the outside world creep into their consciousness.

Despite my recent sighting of an octogenarian sporting a pair of Dr Dre`s beats, it`s the younger generation who are most keen to be sporting earphones while out and about. Live streaming, social media, Spotify - these are used many by the under 25`s. It saddens me to think how many hours I spent making mixed tapes - painstakingly fast forwarding and rewinding, copying songs from albums, and methodically transferring them onto my compilation tape. These days of course it is so easy to make a playlist - and there can be one for every mood, every event. A playlist for exercise, for travel - and also for study.

Many students claim that listening to music helps them learn - and though thousands of parents may believe otherwise, there had never been any scientific proof that it impeded study and understanding. There were only a few studies focussing on this issue - a 1988 paper by Martin, Wotalger and Forlano seemed to suggest that lyrical music impaired reading comprehension though these findings were contradicted by a broad range of music and cognition literature, which opined that cognitive performance is enhanced when listening to music one likes.

A study conducted at the applied psychology department of Cardiff Metropolitan University seems to have finally addressed this issue once and for all. Nick Perham and Harriet Currie have published a paper entitled `Does listening to preferred music improve Reading comprehension performance?`

Their study consisted of four groups of students: the first revised in silence, while the second revised listening to music they liked; the third listened to music with lyrics they didn`t like (the study mentions they listened to extreme heavy metal music), and the forth group revised while listening to music without any lyrics.

The students were studying a piece of English literature, and their subsequent test was one of basic comprehension. After the examination each student was asked to predict how well they thought they had performed. The report summarised its four main findings:

• Those students who were revising in silence scored on average 60% higher in the exam than those who were revising while listening to music containing lyrics.
• Students who had revised in silence gained the highest marks in the exam, as well as making the highest predicted grades.
• Students who revised listening to music without lyrics performed better in their exams than students who listened to music containing lyrics.
• Perhaps most surprisingly - there was no discernible difference in exam results between students studying listening to music they liked, compared to those listening to music they disliked.

It seems that silence is most conducive to an environment that will facilitate learning - hardly a revelatory statement. To learn is to change the mind: to refine it, to reshape it - if we are distracted, if our mind is attending to other things (such as music) then the lesson can have only limited impact.

There has been related research showing that certain music can have a positive impact on an individual`s mood: a study by Petri Laukka and Lina Quick in 2011 revealed this, along with music being able to motivate and help people stay focussed during certain forms of exercise. It seems parents finally have the scientific validation to demand that their children turn off their music while studying.