Musical Math
By Stephanie Zhuang and Willow Tzonev
Junior Category (Grades 7-8)
Experiment | Biology, Psychology
Did you know that over 95% of Canadian teens listen to over 31 hours of music a week, often while doing homework or reading? In this experiment we tested kids age 12 and 13 to see if different genres of music affected their focus. The question that we asked was “How does music affect focus and which type is the best for your focus?”.
Our hypothesis was that If we play different types of music and have participants work on a math sheet then we think that it will help them focus and classical music will be the best for concentration because our background research shows that classical music can improve brain development, memory, mood, learning, and focus. We tested a diverse group 15 kids age 12 to 13. The participants were required to do written math problems while listening to different types of music.
In conclusion, our hypothesis is not supported by our results. We found that working in silence is the best for focus and concentration on mathwork. However, this study does not speak for everyone. Different people work and perform differently with different types of music. Therefore this experiment is not a perfectly fair test. If we do this experiment again, we would give headphones to the participants to listen to the music so they would not be distracted by the outside noise. We would also add more types of music to the experiment and test more participants for a wider range of data.
