In a study conducted by Lund University in Sweden, 24 university students comprised of 12 females and 12 males, were asked to take part in reading comprehension tests while they listened to music they preferred, the music they did not prefer, cafe background noise, and silence. The aim of this study was to identify “how reading comprehension is affected by different kinds of music and a certain type of background noise, and it examines whether the commonly-held belief that certain music improves reading comprehension is actually true.” (Johansson et al., 2012). To quantify the effect of music while students worked on reading comprehension questions, researchers “selected a number of texts that had been used in the Swedish Scholastic Assessment Test (SweSAT).” (Johansson et al., 2012), the reading passages were in the subject areas of economics and sociology. The procedure that was used during the test is as follows, “the experiment leader informed them that they were about to read four different texts and that, immediately after reading each text, they would answer four multiple-choice questions about that text. They were also informed that they would read one of the texts to their own preferred music, one to the non-preferred music, one to recorded noise from a café and one in silence, and that they would always answer the questions in silence.” (Johansson et al., 2012). They had 20mins in total to finish reading each text and answer the questions.
Students who wrote the reading comprehension tests in silence scored the highest and students scored the lowest when they wrote the test listening to music they did not prefer. Thus according to this study students should not listen to music while they complete tasks that require analyzing passages.
References:
Johansson, R., Holmqvist, K., Mossberg, F., & Lindgren, M. (2012). Eye movements and reading comprehension while listening to preferred and non-preferred study music. Psychology of Music, 40(3), 339–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735610387777
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