Why does music affect your test performance?

Answer 1

If your homework involves reading something, then the answer is usually no. A widely accepted study (Salame & Baddeley, '89) shows that the performance of working memory on a word recall task is worse when listening to music than in a silent setting. Listening to lyrical music is correlated with worse performance than listening to instrumental music.

A caveat. If you're studying in a noisy setting (and especially if you're not very good at filtering out irrelevant speech/noise), then listening to music over headphones can benefit your ability to concentrate by blocking out distracting sounds. However, the above study results still apply, so there is both a benefit and cost to studying with headphones on.

If your homework is to write something, then I'm not sure whether listening to music will help you concentrate. This study says no, but there are many others who say yes.

When we learnt about Salame & Baddeley in PSY372 (human memory), a fellow student asked whether listening to music would negatively effect one's ability to solve mathematical problems. The prof answered probably not, basically because the ability to do mathematics is a procedural skill (the prof hadn't read any studies supporting that claim, although it does seem reasonable). However, I have no idea whether listening to music while doing math actually benefits concentration, as some of my friends believe. I do know that listening to music while reading a math textbook negatively effects subsequent recall.

If your homework is to draw, paint, or create something artistic then my intuition says that listening to (good) music will help you concentrate.

Just one more (slightly tangential) thing: the Mozart effect is a myth.

Best of luck in your studies. Listen to music wisely.

Answer 2

I don't have scientific evidence,but from personal observation the answer is deffinatly: yes.The sounds we hear and the volume we receive them at does effect the way we think as well as constantly providing information and/or reminding us of past expiriences in which the same song was played.An example is,once I read a book in English listening to Guano Apes- during a test I was listening to the same song and quickly finished a few hard to do exercises,because the book had the same kind of sentances.Another thing is stimulating the nerve system and/or creating feelings such as anger.

Answer 3

If you are listening to music while you are trying to memorize facts then you would start to memorize the words of the song instead of memorizing the facts that you should be memorizing: this is by a random person.

I don't know about you but if I listen to music while trying to study the music helps me. Sometimes there are different situations, but music helps me focus and calm down. By: Angie Brianne =)

hello, well, honestly it can change the way you think and change the things you want to do.....because it,believe me on this one as it somewhat happened to me.....it changes your feeling because the things it is saying or ringing and also putting repetition and rithims in your head, now the bad thing about those two is they literaly change the way you think....whatever you think and then want to do.........................just, sometimes,or mabey dont listen to to much or not at all really if you dont like the feeling of posibly being messed up in the brain.

i like pie ^.^

Hi there, I think you mean if you SING the words you're trying to memorize. That definitely helps. Some examples are the SchoolHouseRock songs. I memorized the Preamble to the Constitution very easily by singing the Preamble Song.

BUT if you are just listening to RANDOM music while memorizing something, you'll lose your focus. In my opinion.

Hope this helped! BYE(: AND BTW, Cake is sooo much better. ^^ ;)

Answer 4

the answer to this question is a two way answer because there is not right or wrong way to study whatever helps you the best is the right answer there is over a 1,000 ways you can study and this is only one of them so just think of those other 999 ways you can study so don"t ever let anyway tell you that there's only one way to study because that would not be true at all..

Answer 5

Music can either help you to relax and concentrate, or it can distract you. Quiet instrumental music helps you to do better on a test because it soothes your anxiety and helps give you a steady, soft background instead of total silence (which distracts many people). Loud music, music with vocals, or music with heavy rhythms distracts you and makes your test scores lower because you end up paying more attention to that sort of music than to the test.

Answer 6

Well yes it does because it helps you focus on your work

Answer 7

you will most likely get distracted