![]() ![]() But I don’t think it supports telling individual children not to listen to music while they read. ![]() In a big sample, you’d say it will reduce mean comprehension. Still, I think this is a case where individual difference play an important role.Īs far as practice goes, I think this finding could be offered as support for a decision not to play music to every child in a classroom. For a while they thought introversion/extraversion might be the answer, but that didn’t pan out. Part, but not all, of that variability is noisy measurement.Īs the article notes, researchers have sought variables that differentiate why music hurts, fails to influence, or even helps comprehension. What this indicates is that, while mean of the grand distribution may show a small hit to comprehension when background music plays, it's NOT the case that every child reads a little worse with background music on. Looking at the breakdown of individual studies it’s easy to see that the studies trend towards the stated conclusion. The meta-analysis reports a small, consistent cost to reading comprehension when listening to music. The influence of background music on reading may be a case where Rose’s warning is pertinent. The entire subfield called individual differences is devoted to identifying ways in which we all differ. I criticized Rose’s book because I argued that (1) many principles of the mind do apply pretty well across the board-everyone’s attention is limited, for example and (2) psychologists are generally aware of the problem Rose identifies. The cockpit will be a good fit for a few, but will be too big or too small for most. To use Rose’s example, if you measure a large group of airplane pilots and find their average height is 69 inches, and then design airplane cockpits assuming “pilots are 69 inches tall,” well, you’ll be disappointed. That doesn’t mean it is a good representative of every data point. Now I didn’t care much for this book, because I thought Rose took a valid concern and ran much too far with it, but here it’s applicable.Īn average is meant as a summary that gives you a sense of the central tendency of a distribution. ![]() This is a point of interpretation around which Todd Rose framed his book, The End of Average. In response, several folks on twitter commented as much to say “ok, so we should tell kids not read with music on.” The article concluded that that background noise, speech, and music all have small but reliable negative impacts on reading comprehension. Students and educators are keenly interested in this issue, because some students like to read with music on in the background and some educators wonder whether that affects comprehension. It’s an issue of broad concern, as many of us read at work in noisy office environments, and when we read for pleasure we may be on a subway, at a playground, and so on. On September 15 I tweeted about a new meta-analysis that examines the impact of auditory distraction on reading. ![]()
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