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Pros and cons

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Plan ahead and pass with a distinction. Here are our top tips to plan and implement before you start studying.
Home duties and partner support

Ensure that your family knows exactly what you are doing and why, as you will be changing your role in the household and may be unavailable for activities that you would have previously participated in. Make them aware that you intend to achieve study success.

Negotiate time off or reduce your work hours

You may be able to negotiate time off for study if your chosen qualification is work-related. Alternatively, you may just have to take on a reduced workload in order to have the necessary time to devote to studying.

Realistic workload

Following on from point two, work out a realistic workload in terms of what you take on. Better to take a bit longer to complete your qualification than to crash and burn during the course.

Remove all distractions

Music can have positive and negative effects on studying, depending on the student and the music. For some students listening to music while studying relaxes them and allows them to focus on the work in front of them. However, for other students, it can be another distraction that makes studying more difficult.Typically, it's thought that if you are going to listen to music while studying, it's best to listen to soothing, instrumental music and sounds such as Mozart or nature sounds.

Eat well

When studying, you need to ensure you are eating food that will help your brain hum with great ideas and long-term concentration rather than offer short bursts of energy. Some of the best snacks to eat while studying include:

Suitable study schedule

Following on from the previous point, draw up a study schedule that plays to your strengths as a morning person or a night person. Don't forget to include breaks for your health's sake.

Getting friends on board with your new schedule

Make sure that your friends, extended family and teammates (if you play organised sport) know that you may not be available at certain times and that they should not try to tempt you away from your routine.

Suitable study area

Excellent pre-study preparation is to create a study area/room/nook for yourself that is free from distraction and where you can work with minimal interruption. Paying attention to what you are doing and minimising distractions will create a "sticky" study environment - meaning simply, you'll be more likely to remember.

Suitable computer

Make sure your computer meets any requirements that may have been specified by your education institute, e.g. operating system version, suitable web browser, appropriate document creation software etc.

Good internet access

It is extremely frustrating to have your internet access go down right when you are in the middle of something important or to find you have run out of bandwidth because of all the videos you have had to watch for a course.Do some research to ensure that you have the most reliable and suitable internet access you can afford.

Course assistance

Be aware of the avenues of assistance that your education institute makes available. Career advise and study counselling services are provided for you. Find out exactly what they offer and use them if you need them.

Knowledge of academic integrity standards

Your institution will have certain policies in place with regard to academic integrity. This will cover matters such as what constitutes plagiarism and its penalties and how cheating will be dealt with.
These study tips cover productive ways to prepare for study. Use the lead-up to the actual start of study time to set yourself up for success. Browse Foundation Education's nationally recognised courses and start your studies online today. Call today.

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Study Tips To Help You Nail That Test | Foundation Education

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Got a big test coming up? Foundation Educations shares their top ten study tips you can plan and implement before you start hitting the books today.

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Listening to Music while Studying: A Good or a Bad Idea? — The Learning Scientists

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Listening to Music while Studying: A Good or a Bad Idea? — The Learning Scientists

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Many factors matter whether or not music has a positive or negative effect on studying.

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I rush into the library to drop off some books. When I turn around I see students sitting at tables going over their notes and reading their textbooks; studying. It's that time of the year again: Exam season is underway. I notice that many of them are wearing headphones and I start to wonder: What are they listening to? Their favourite songs, relaxing lounge tunes, or white noise that cancels out disturbing noise from the outside? Does it make a difference at all what they are listening to while studying?

Before reviewing research that has looked into this question, let me first bust a myth about music and human cognitive skills. You have probably heard about the Mozart Effect. If you ask people in the general public about this effect, they will probably say something along the lines: Oh yes, listening to music by Mozart makes you smarter. However, this statement is not only completely false, but is also a misinterpretation of the Mozart Effect. The Mozart Effect is a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata. The finding was reported by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1) in an experiment where they had students listen to Mozart's piano sonata, to a relaxation music, or to nothing (silence condition) before performing a spatial reasoning task (a subtest from the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale). The researchers found that participants' performance on the spatial reasoning task improved after they had listened to the Mozart sonata compared to the other conditions. However, there are a couple of points that are important to know:

1. the effect is extremely short-lived with the positive enhancement in spatial reasoning only lasting for 10-15 minutes,

2. the improvement is restricted to a quite abstract mental rotation task that is only a small part of the equation when assessing intelligence, and

3. other studies were not able to replicate this finding (2).

Taken together, the Mozart Effect has no relevance for educational practice and, unfortunately, listening to Mozart music will not make you smarter.

Now that this is out of the way, let's turn to studies that have investigated the effects of background music on learning. One idea why listening to background music while studying or performing a task may be potentially beneficial has been put forward by Schellenberg and colleagues (3) in their arousal-emotion/mood-activation hypothesis. It assumes that music that puts you in a positive mood has a positive effect on your performance. Another idea is the changing state hypothesis, which states that rapidly changing music will distract learning and lead to poor performance (4).

What evidence is there for either of the explanations and can we find an answer to the question whether listening to music while learning is a good or bad thing? In one study, for example, participants studied vocabulary pairs either under a silence condition or music condition with classical music playing in the background (5). Participants underwent three learning sessions and were tested one week later. The results show that participants tend to perform better on the final test when they had listened to music while studying vocabulary. However, the author of that study acknowledges that not all participants seemed to have benefitted to the same extent from listening to background music during studying. Another study looked into this more closely and investigated the role of personality traits for the effects of background music on different cognitive tasks (6). The results of this study are quite mixed. For instance, whether performance was hindered or helped by background music depended on the type of task. For instance, verbal reasoning was better under the music condition compared to the silence condition, but abstract perceptual reasoning was hurt by simultaneously listening to music. After controlling for general IQ, background music showed a negative effect on introverted people for abstract reasoning, but no effect on extraverted people. For verbal reasoning, however, introverts and extraverts were not affected differently by listening to music while performing the task. One explanation for this finding is that the abstract reasoning task is more complex than the verbal reasoning task. Thus, task complexity seems to play a moderating role when deciding whether to listen to music while studying. If the task at hand is quite complex and you are more on the introverted spectrum you may be better off studying without music.

Hallam, Price, and Katsarou (7) investigated the effects of background music on math learning and verbal memorisation in young children in primary school. For math learning, they had pupils solve arithmetic problems under music (mood-calming) or silence conditions. Although pupils performed equally well under both conditions in regard to accuracy, they solved the math problems quicker in the music condition. The verbal memorisation task required them to read sentences and remember a missing word in a sentence for later. Studying occurred under one of three conditions: silence, unpleasant/ aggressive music, or pleasant/calm music. Again, it was found that performance was best when pupils had studied with pleasant music playing in the background. Performance was worst in the unpleasant, aggressive music condition. Thus, it seems to be the case that music that puts you in a good mood and that is not interrupting because of rapid changes in tempi can be beneficial while studying. The studies presented so far did not test these two explanations against each other, but a study by Jäncke and Sandmann (8) did. Surprisingly, they did not find any substantial or consistent influence of background music on verbal learning. Thus, whether participants studied with or without pleasant/unpleasant/slow changing /fast changing instrumental music in the background did not matter.

So, should you listen to music while you are studying? As it is often the case when looking at evidence from research, the answer seems to boil down to: It depends! Certainly, features of the task seem to play a crucial role and studying complex material that requires you to engage all your focus on what you are trying to understand may be hindered by any kind of background music. Tasks that require you to keep track of several pieces of information at one time while processing them, too (i.e., tasks heavy on working memory demands), may be particularly affected by any kind of background music or noise (9) and are best done in complete silence. Your personality seems also to play a role on whether you will benefit at all from listening to your favourite tunes while studying. And only to complicate things even further, we have seen that an interaction of both factors, task complexity and personality, may be in place. Nevertheless, positive effects of background music have been found and it may certainly be worth trying it out.

I, personally, don't do anything without listening to music. So, while writing this blog post, I have been listening to soothing background music. However, in the past, I have caught myself turning the music down when trying to grasp a complex bit of information when reading a scientific article. So, there you go: It depends!

References

(1) Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L., & Ky, K.N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365, 611.

(2) McKelvie, P., & Law, J. (2002). Listening to Mozart does not improve children's spatial ability: Final curtains for the Mozart effect. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20, 241-258.

(3) Schellenberg, E. G., Nakata, T., Hunter, P. G., & Tamoto, S. (2007). Exposure to music and cognitive performance: Tests of children and adults. Psychology of Music, 35, 5-19.

(4) Jones, D. M., Alford, D., Macken, W. J., Banbury, S. P., & Tremblay, S. (2000). Interference from degraded auditory stimuli: linear effects of changing-state in the irrelevant sequence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 108, 1082-1088.

(5) de Groot, A. M. B. (2006). Effects of stimulus characteristics and background music on foreign language vocabulary learning and forgetting. Language Learning, 56, 463-506.

(6) Dobbs, S., Furnham, A., & McClelland, A. (2011). The effect of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25, 307-313.

(7) Hallam, S., Price, J., & Katsarou, G. (2002). The effects of background music on primary school pupils' task performance. Educational Studies, 28, 111-122.

(8) Jäncke, L., & Sandmann, P. (2010). Music listening while you learn: No influence of background music on verbal learning. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 6, 1-14.

(9) Alley, T. R., & Greene, M. E. (2008). The relative and perceived impact of irrelevant speech, vocal music and non-vocal music on working memory. Current Psychology, 27, 277-289.

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I rush into the library to drop off some books. When I turn around I see students sitting at tables going over their notes and reading their textbooks; studying. It's that time of the year again: Exam season is underway. I notice that many of them are wearing headphones ...

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Should you listen to music while you study?

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Should you listen to music while you study?

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Music helps with mood but not necessarily learning.

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Headphones can seem ubiquitous in a college library, a function of responsible students' attempts to isolate themselves from the conversations and noises around them. However, another form of distraction may be coming right up those cables, and for some, it may be time to face the music -- or more specifically, the lyrics.

"Music with lyrics is very likely to have a problematic effect when you're writing or reading," said Clifford Nass, professor at Stanford University. "Probably less of an effect on math, if you're not using the language parts of your brain."

Music has a profound impact on our state of being, altering everything from mood to heart rate. It can energize or depress us. Medium levels of arousal are ideal for studying -- not too agitated and not too relaxed -- and music can also be an effective tool in leading students to that level.

"Imagine trying to learn something while you're on a roller coaster," Nass said. "If you're feeling agitated, you can listen to more calming music, and that will absolutely have a positive effect."

Glenn Schellenberg, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Toronto, published a study that indicates fast, loud background music hinders reading comprehension.

"The reason why it's a mess is you have cognitive limitations. If you're doing two things at once you don't focus as well," he said. "On the other hand, we know that music changes how you feel, and often it can change how you feel in a positive way."

In other words, it seems carefully tailoring the music you listen to while studying, based on the subject matter and your mood, can help keep you focused -- so long as you stay away from lyrics while doing language-based work.

Music has always had its place at college, but as it has become more portable and high quality, it is reaching areas where it never used to take up residence.

"In my day, there was no way you could take music to the library," Nass said. "When [today's students] go to the library to study, they bring their noise, and music, with them."

In any case, music is very likely better than Facebook and Twitter, and in a world where multitasking has become extremely common because everything is on one device, some students find music helps keep them focused while studying.

"Especially when music doesn't have words, it can help me get into the reading and stop me getting distracted by other things," said Melanie Fineman, a junior at Brown University. "It makes studying more enjoyable."
Some more modern alternatives to the usual lyric-less Mozart: Sofia Castello y Tickell is a Fall 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here. Follow her on Twitter. This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2KTCrnP

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Should you listen to music while you study?

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Headphones can seem ubiquitous in a college library, a function of responsible students' attempts to isolate themselves from the conversations and noises around them. However, another form of distraction may be coming right up those cables, and for some, it may be time to face the music -- or more specifically, the lyrics.

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Does Music Help You Study: Science Says There Are Many Benefits

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Does Music Help You Study: Science Says There Are Many Benefits

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Positives for listening to music while reading and writing.

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With that highly detailed Biology exam just around the corner, you have been hitting the books with every spare second you have. During nightly, starlit studying sessions, you continuously trudge past midnight, and the hours multiply. What if there was a more beneficial practice rather than spending hours upon hours of silence studying in your bedroom?

The Theory

You have likely heard before that music helps you study. But, do you know why parents and professors alike are urging you to tune to iTunes? Studies have shown that music produces several positive effects on a human's body and brain. Music activates both the left and right brain at the same time, and the activation of both hemispheres can maximize learning and improve memory. Find out music's effect on your body and brain, and see how to enhance your studying with songs!

Proven to Ease Student Stress

In the middle of a busy semester, students' stress runs high. This is the perfect reason to study your class notes with music playing, - it is proven to help reduce stress!

Music is a way to process emotions and strengthen their resolve while being overwhelmed. People often turn to the music they can relate to as it helps them deal with stress in this way. So, if university life has got you feeling a bit down, dazed or distracted then it might be a good idea to put some music on while you study. Not only will it help you concentrate on your studies, it will also help keep stress at bay and put you in the learning mood.

Reduce Test Anxiety

Anxiety can become a crippling blockade between students and their textbooks. How can students beat it? Let's pretend you were offered a free, soothing massage during each study session for the duration of your college years. You would feel lower levels of anxiety and tension as you reviewed your notes. While this might be a difficult feat for the typical college student to attain, the next best thing is readily available to pupils all over the world. Believe it or not, USA Today reveals, "one study found that music's effect on anxiety levels is similar to the effect of getting a massage" (Christ). It is official; your favorite tunes can reduce anxiety as much as a massage! Anxiety-stricken students should pop in the earbuds before heading to the library. They will feel relaxed, at ease, and ready to conquer chapter after chapter.

If you're like many students suffering from anxiety and stress, try listening to rap music while studying. A study done by Cambridge University showed that hip-hop music provides an uplifting effect on its listeners that can help them accept, manage and deal better with mental health issues. There's more than one genre of rap, so find the one you like if it means giving your brain that extra bit of support it needs.

Improve Your Performance

Music is found to help people perform better in high-pressure situations, such as the bi-annual high-pressure event that is finals week. Studies have shown that music can help students transform from coal to diamonds, shining under pressure. USA Today asks, "Want to sink the game-winning shot when the pressure's on? Listen to some upbeat tunes before the big game. . . basketball players prone to performing poorly under pressure during games were significantly better during high-pressure free-throw shooting if they first listened to catchy, upbeat music and lyrics"(Christ). This relates to anyone combating high-pressure situations, including you and your studious peers! Grab that 80's style boom box and turn the volume up!

It can even cure pain!

So, you arrived at the last Conquistadors basketball game, prepared to perform better after a little music therapy. Excited and energized, you played all of your best moves on the court, until you sprained your ankle landing a slam dunk. Ouch! Now, every time you attempt to study, your mind only focuses on the pounding pain in your ankle! Have you tried studying with music? According to USA Today, music is so powerful to the body that it can actually help ease the pain. Studies show that music can meaningfully reduce the perceived intensity of pain, especially in geriatric care, intensive care, or palliative medicine.

Your ankle pain and your midterm stand no chance against your favorite album and focused mind! Similar to how a lullaby would calm you, listening to music can also help you relax as by lowering your blood pressure, easing muscle tension and increasing your attention span.

It will help you focus more

Rather than distracting college students, a Stanford study found that "music moves [the] brain to pay attention." Researchers utilized musical compositions from the 1800s in their study and found that "music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory" (Baker). They believe that music choice was influential in brain processing, revealing, "The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information" (Baker). Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven can help students categorize information, which is an influential asset to studying.

Proven to improve brain functions

Musical activity serves as a cognitive exercise for the brain which trains it for more challenges in the future. Therefore, people who have musical training early on, specifically before age seven, have healthier brains and are less likely to suffer from debilitating diseases like Alzheimer's or Dementia. But you don't have to wait for a certain age before benefitting from music. Regardless of whether you're a freshman or senior, you can start exercising your brain now, simply by having your favorite device and earphones handy for any study session.

Music, Memory, Emotions

Several studies in recent years have linked music, memory, and emotion. To back this claim, Petr Janata has conducted two studies to prove that music, memory, and emotion are linked. His initial study found that "music serves as a potent trigger for retrieving memories." During his second study, Janata took Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of students' brains as he played popular songs from their childhood and teenage years. "After each excerpt, the student responded to questions about the tune, including whether it was familiar or not, how enjoyable it was, and whether it was associated with any particular incident, episode or memory" (UC Davis). This study reveals that music, memory, and emotions and strongly linked. This evidence supports the theory that studying while listening to music is a very beneficial practice.

Ever wondered why it's easier to memorize the lyrics to a song than the periodic table of elements? That's because your brain looks for patterns to better understand, recall, and process information. It's the same reason why music producers always put a hook in their songs since what is more commonly known as the earworm or catchy bit.

"Earworm" was coined in 1979 by psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert. It happens when a part of the song gets stuck in your head for an extended period of time and you can't get it out. It just so happens, this is also one way of improving your brain's memory, which is why some language courses are set to a musical pattern of ear-catching melodies. Some even suggest that the benefits don't necessarily depend on the kind of music you listen to, but rather how effectively your brain latches on to the pattern of the song.

End Your Study Session with Classical Music

We now understand that music and memory are strongly linked in the brain, and that music can be beneficial to study. All that studying, however, has made you exhausted! You close the textbooks and lay beneath your blankets, but your mind is still buzzing from all of the information you've acquired. Can't sleep? Well, music can even help you close out the night after studying. "Listening to classical music has been shown to effectively treat insomnia in college students, making it a safe, cheap alternative to sleep-inducing meds" (Christ).

We Want You To Succeed!

Florida National University (FNU) is dedicated to helping our students succeed. While you continue to excel at FNU, please take advantage of our helpful resources. As the semester comes to a close, gain tips from our blog article, " 10 Ways to Prepare for Your Final Exam," and don't forget your headphones!

If you are not currently enrolled at FNU, browse our programs of study and apply now!

Works Cited

Baker, Mitzi. "Music Moves Brain to Pay Attention." Stanford School of Medicine. Stanford School of Medicine, 01 Aug. 2007. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

Christ, Scott. "20 Surprising, Science-backed Health Benefits of Music." USA Today. Gannett, 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

"Stress." University of Maryland Medical Center. University of Maryland Medical Center, n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

"Study Finds Brain Hub That Links Music, Memory and Emotion :: UC Davis News & Information." UC Davis News & Information. UC Davis, 23 Feb. 2009. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

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The Benefits of Studying with Music - Florida National University

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Does Music Help You Study? With that highly detailed Biology exam just around the corner, you have been hitting the books with every spare second you have. During nightly, starlit studying sessions, you continuously trudge past midnight, and the hours multiply. What if there was a more beneficial practice rather than spending hours upon hours...

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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Negative effects of music while trying to complete complex or new tasks.

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers, as we all seek to answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school? This time, we consider growth mindset.
Many students do their homework and revision while listening to music. Many of them will swear that listening to their favourite songs makes them study better. But does music help or hinder learning? And does it matter what type of music you listen to while revising?

Researchers from the applied psychology department of Cardiff Metropolitan University led a study to answer this question. The authors, Nick Perham and Harriet Currie, assigned students into one of four groups: the first revised in silence, the second revised while listening to music with lyrics they liked (which included songs from One Direction and Katy Perry), the third group revised to music with lyrics they did not like (which comprised of very heavy metal bands), and the fourth group revised listening to music without lyrics.

The participants then took a test on the passages they had been revising, rating how distracting their environment had been, as well as writing down their predictions for how well they thought they had done.

What are the main findings?

1. Students who revised in quiet environments performed more than 60% better in an exam than their peers who revised while listening to music that had lyrics.

2. Students who revised while listening to music without lyrics did better than those who had revised to music with lyrics.

3. It made no difference if students revised listening to songs they liked or disliked. Both led to a reduction in their test performance.

4. Students who revised in silence rated their environment as less distracting and accurately predicted that this would lead to better performances in subsequent tests.

Related research

There are some benefits to listening to music while performing certain tasks. It can be quite motivating and it can improve mood (listening to your favourite song tends to make people smile, for example). But it does not help people learn new or complex material.

The misconception that music does help us learn stems from a series of studies linked to the " Mozart effect ", which found that people performed better on a series of cognitive tasks after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart. Participants in these studies appeared to be getting smarter and performing better in tests.

However, further research has since revealed this is not the case. While listening to music before a task can make someone feel better, listening to it while trying to learn something new tends not to help. This is because music - especially tunes with lyrics - can take up processing space. This conflicts with the material you are trying to learn, effectively creating a bottleneck in your memory, as there is less space to process what you are revising.

What does this mean for the classroom?

It is important that students are made aware of the pitfalls of listening to music when revising. Perham and Currie's study found that students rated the quiet environment as less distracting and better for them, yet many students continue to listen to music during their homework. Why? Perhaps they're doing so out of habit, or they confuse what improves their mood with what leads to good revision, or it alleviates boredom. Perhaps it's simply because everyone else is doing it.

Students need to know how to revise well. There may well be a time and place to listen to music during the course of their revision, but not when they are learning new and complex material. After all, silence is golden.

Bradley Busch is a registered psychologist, director at InnerDrive and author of Release Your Inner Drive. Follow @Inner_Drive on Twitter, and get advice on improving memory and a visual summary of this research on his website
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice.