An article published in January by Study International suggests that listening to music while studying may be a more effective method of helping students receive better grades during the semester than studying in a group with fellow students.
The article covers the Mozart effect on the human mind. The Mozart was a term coined by Dr. Gordon Shaw in the 90s to describe the now-debunked impact that music had on young children.
Shaw determined that music could raise a young child’s IQ by two points. He also concluded that classical music could raise the IQ score of a college student by as much as nine points. Shaw’s work was highly praised at the time but was later debunked by over 40 studies 10 years later.
While listening to music may not raise your IQ by nine points, music can have a profound impact on your mood while studying. A study published in Nature Neuroscience determined that listening to music releases dopamine into the brain. Dopamine is a naturally produced chemical in the body that is associated with happiness and the feeling of being rewarded, which can lead to positive impacts in studying.
Another study by Alice Isen stated that listening to music can also increase an individual’s ability to be creative.
Some experts disagree with the concept of listening to music to increase performance. Some believe that music can be a hindrance to people while they try to work.
Several studies have shown that listening to music while performing complicated tasks like writing can lead to students being less efficient at the job. Loud and angry music has the potential to lowers students reading comprehension.
The University of Phoenix has found that listening to music with a lot of lyrics can lead to difficulty in focus and knowledge retention. The brain splits focus between listening to the music and what the student is working on.
At the same time, researches in France published a study in Learning and Individual Differences that listening to classical music in the background helped students make better grades while taking a quiz.
The researchers wrote,” It is possible that music, provoking a change in the learning environment, influenced the students’ motivation to remain focused during the lecture, which led to better performance on the multiple-choice quiz.”
Ultimately the use of music while studying is going to be left up to the personal preference of the student.
