Left to Their Own Devices

First there was the transistor radio. Then, the boombox. The Walkman followed, along with its next generation offspring, the Discman. iPods and tiny MP3 players, as well as smartphones, are more recent gadgets that allow music—piped into the ears via headphones or earbuds, wired or bluetooth—to be the 24/7 accompaniment to each of our lives The sound of silence has been replaced by the sound of whatever your streaming music subscription is playing at the moment.     

In so many classrooms today, students are “working” with one or more earbuds in their ears. Their smartphones are supplying the soundtrack to their school day as they read, write, take notes, watch their teachers teach, and collaborate with peers. Teachers who support leaving students to their own devices for background music say that their students are quieter and better behaved when they listen to music while reading and/or writing. They subscribe to the misquoted adage from playwright William Congreve: “Music soothes the savage beast.” (The actual quotation, I discovered, is, “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast.” Who knew?) Other teachers ignore the earbuds, perhaps believing that the student is unplugged or the music is paused, though I almost always eventually see that student reach into a hoodie pocket to skip a song that shuffled onto their playlist or make a new music selection.

When left to their own devices, teenagers will choose music over silence, and most will justify that preference by saying that it helps them concentrate and that they are more productive when music is playing. Research, however, shows that in most cases, student-selected music interferes with cognitive tasks in academic subject areas. Here are a few nuggets of information teachers can use to shape their in-class listening policies and respond to teenagers who disagree with them:

• The consensus among education researchers is that music has a negative effect on tasks relying on linguistic comprehension, writing, and memory.
• The exceptions to this are creative production (like working on an artwork), productivity (like mindless assembly line work), and perhaps exercises that involve spatial manipulation (you know, useful things like folding up a piece of paper, punching some holes in it, and predicting what it will look like when it is unfolded). The so-called Mozart Effect that had parents rushing to purchase classical music CDs to make their babies smarter is a little more limited than originally reported, and there’s nothing magical about Mozart.
• Music with lyrics is bad for learning. One study (discussed in this article) showed that university students who listened to music with lyrics while reviewing for a test scored more than 60% worse than their peers who studied in silence. Students listening to music with no lyrics did better than those who studied with lyrics, but the no-music students performed the best.   
• Silence increases reading comprehension, too.
• Introverts are more adversely affected by background music while reading and studying. While music had a negative effect on reading comprehension and memory for introverts, their classmates who were extraverts did not see a notable decline in memory, only in comprehension, said a 1997 report by Furnham and Bradley.    
• “Fast and loud” music disrupts reading comprehension the most, according to a 2011 study by Thompson, Schellenberg, and Letnic.
• Musicians’ brains seem to be wired differently. Listening to music has a more severely negative effect on language comprehension for trained musicians than for non-musicians. Language and music appear to be processed by the same neural networks in the brain. Visualspatial test results were the same for musicians and non-musicians. This article explains further.   
• A 2010 study by Anderson and Fuller showed that not only does reading comprehension performance decline significantly when junior high students are listening to music, but it declines more significantly for those who say they prefer listening to music while they read. In other words, the kids who protest the most when you tell them to take out their earbuds are the ones who benefit the most from your asking them to do so.   
• Writing is affected negatively by music, too, even if the writer is not paying attention to it. According to a 2001 study by Ransdell and Gilroy, college students who had music playing while they were writing expository essays using a word processing program had more difficulty with word fluency. They generated fewer words per minute and had to delete more prior to their final drafts.   
• Music can improve one’s mood, so maybe there’s some usefulness when you’re dealing with surly teenagers.  
• There's abundant research about the myth of multitasking and how we can't simultaneously focus on texting, tending to social media, and doing cognitive tasks, but today I'm sticking to the topic of background music. 

I remember a department head of mine who would have team meetings with classical music quietly playing in the background. I left every meeting with Vivaldi stuck in my head no clue about the content of the meeting.

Apparently, I’m not alone in having these challenges.

If we aim to make our classrooms places where students engage in rich reading experiences, produce thoughtful writing, think deeply, and talk about their learning, the research is overwhelmingly in support of banning the earbuds and turning off the background music. Most young people who are literally left to the own devices aren’t going to make decisions that are best for their learning. Stretching students to become uncomfortable with silence and to be alone with their thoughts might be doing them a favor in the long run.  

The only trick is going to be convincing them of that. . . .