You will prepare and submit a term paper on Does different music tempos affect the arithmetic and writing performance of college students. Your paper should be a minimum of 1750 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Does different music tempos affect the arithmetic and writing performance of college students. Your paper should be a minimum of 1750 words in length. A quick observation of students in campus, especially during exams periods paints a picture of students with headphones on while writing a paper or reading a book. Most often, the music tunes that they might be listening to usually range from slow, lyrical, instrumental, to dance, heavy metal, or loud music. Over the years a lot of debates have been initiated with regards to whether or not studying while listening to music was disadvantageous or beneficial. however, none of those debates have been able to yield any definite answer. is a given tempo of music more distracting than others? Is music in general a distraction to learner?

Numerous researches have been conducted in this regard, specifically, to test whether different music tempos or different types of music have some impact on student’s cognitive performance, such as writing, memory, arithmetic, and comprehension. For instance, a study by Furnham & Stephenson (2007) found that lullaby-like, or soft music had the effect of improving people’s cognitive ability and that high tempo or more upbeat music has the effect of decreasing people’s cognitive ability. In that research by Furnham and Stephenson (2007), 118 elementary level students were given four different tasks, which entailed free recall, mental arithmetic, reading comprehension, and verbal reasoning, to complete. The results suggested that students listening to less upbeat or soft music performed better than the students who were listening to high tempo music. Thus, the study concluded that students perform tasks better when listening to relaxing, soft music such as low tempo classical music. These findings cloud possibly be explained by the fact that calming, soft music relaxed the participants and assisted them in calming their nerves. The slow tempo, relaxing, and calming music was not more of a distracter as the high tempo, upbeat music.