Test anxiety, college students and music
During finals week, the library at Florida Gulf Coast University stays open for 24 hours. This enables students to stay as long as they’d like to study. However, according to the “Journal of Education Psychology,” cramming is unhealthy and can cause test anxiety. It also results in lower test scores and a lower ability to focus.
Dr. Michael Ghali, an employee at the Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) center, specializes in anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. He explained that while it’s good to see so many students studying in the library at FGCU, staying there until 3 a.m. is detremential to information retention, focus and motivation.
“If a student pulls an all-nighter the day before an exam, they won’t have the knowledge or motivation to complete the exam successfully,” said Dr. Ghali. “They’ll be more focused on finishing the exam so they can go home and sleep.”
Psychologists have found that in some students, the idea of finals week itself causes anxiety, resulting in a sense of urgency which influences the students to work overtime. But psychologists believe can find a solution to the anxiety that comes with finals week.
Music therapy is a well-known concept that is referenced a lot in society and pop culture.
“Mozart makes babies smart,” said a character in Disney’s movie “The Incredibles,” which was released in 2004.
The idea that Mozart increases the activity of brain waves in babies has been around for a long time, but recently, scientists have been investigating otherwise.
Four students at the University of Minnesota conducted an experiment in the spring of this year to find whether pop music or classical music influences students more. The researchers predicted that classical music would assist students in lowering test anxiety more than pop music.
Jack Ross, a junior at the University of Minnesota, came up with the topic of the study. He said that the group of students decided to study the correlation between music and anxiety because of the personal stress they were all feeling and the relevance it holds for all students.
“Previous research overwhelmingly supports the idea that music similar to what the present study called “classical music” results in either greater anxiety reduction or lessened increases in anxiety when studying and when taking tests,” said Ross.
The study divided students into three groups: the control group, the pop music group and the classical music group. Prior to receiving the exam, the participants were told that the test was perceived as easy to most. However, the test was actually deemed somewhat difficult, so when the participants receieved the test, anxiety levels rose with the fear that they were not smart enough.
The students listened to pre-selected music through a speaker in the room as they took a State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) pre-test. According to the American Psychological Association, the STAI pre-test is used in clinical settings to diagnose anxiety and to distinguish it from depressive syndromes.
Once the exams were collected, the participants took a post-test in which they answered questions about how they felt during the exam. The post test revealed that the students who listened to classical music while taking the test felt the most comfortable overall, but results were close. Listening to no music was close behind classical, with pop behind no music.
Heather O’Neil, one of the student researchers, said that she was disappointed with the results because she always listens to pop music while studying. She said it keeps her spirits up while studying a difficult topic.
“Although we did not find significant results, this study made me more attentive to the costs and benefits of listening to different genres of music while studying,” said O’Neil.
Ross said that he would like to take a closer look at what happens to the brain while a student takes an exam with different music genres playing. He believes that the neurological effects of music could provide more insight into musical influences than the post-test that they used.
Within the discussion section of the researchers’ report, they stated that they did not collect enough information on the students for this study to truly be deemed useful. They did not collect demographic information, nor did they ask the subjects if they think they have test anxiety.
On top of that, different groups of students were used for each style of music. Because anxiety levels differ between every single person, there was a possibility that the group that listened to classical music generally experiences test anxiety less than the other two groups.
“There is a phenomena in psychology, I think it is called the ‘closed drawer effect’ or ‘back of the file drawer effect,’ where people want to disregard their entire project when they found that they did not get significant results,” said O’Neil. “This should never be the case! All findings, whether significant or non-significant are valuable and can spark further research.”
