Classical Music and Cognitive Tasks

Abstract

Does listening to classical music help or hinder concentration and performance on cognitive tasks? You'll need help from a teacher to design two short, age-appropriate worksheet tests for this experiment. The tests should be of equal difficulty. You'll also need the cooperation of several additional classroom teachers in order to test enough students (at least 50-100, see the Science Buddies resource: How Many Participants Do I Need?). Half the students will take test A while listening to classical music and test B with no background music. The other half of the students will take test B while listening to classical music and test A with no background music. Analyze the scores to see if there are differences in performance between the music and non-music conditions. You should also be able to show that the two tests are equally difficult under the same conditions (or use the averaged results to correct for any difference in difficulty between the two tests). (Ritblatt, 2004)

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Last edit date: 2017-07-28

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