Some schools are pumping music, noises and fragrances into the classroom to see if it improves exam results – could it work?
What did your school smell like? Was it noisy or peaceful?
It
might not seem important, but a growing body of research suggests that
smells and sounds can have an impact on learning, performance and
creativity. Indeed, some head teachers have recently taken to
broadcasting noises and pumping whiffs into their schools to see whether
it can boost grades. Is there anything in it? And if so, what are the
implications for the way we all work and study?
There is certainly
some well-established research to suggest that some noises can have a
detrimental effect on learning. Numerous studies over the past 15 years
have found that children attending schools under the flight paths of
large airports
lag behind in their exam results.
But
general noise seems to have an effect too. Bridget Shield, a professor
of acoustics at London South Bank University, and Julie Dockrell, now at
the Institute of Education, have been conducting studies and advising
politicians on the effects of all sorts of noises, such as traffic and
sirens, as well as noise generated by the children themselves. When they
recreated those particular sounds in an experimental setting whilst
children completed various cognitive tasks, they found a significant
negative effect on exam scores. “Everything points to a detrimental
impact of the noise on children’s performance, in numeracy, in literacy,
and in spelling,” says Shield. The noise seemed to have an especially
detrimental effect on children with special needs. `
Shield says
the sound of “babble” – the chatter of other children, is particularly
distracting in the classroom. Architects that fashion open-plan
classrooms in schools would do well to take this on board. “People are
very distracted by speech – particularly if it’s understandable, but
you’re not involved in it.” This phenomenon is also known as the
irrelevant speech effect, she says, adding that “it’s a very common
finding in open-plan offices as well.”
Whether background sounds
are beneficial or not seems to depend on what kind of noise it is – and
the volume. In a series of studies published last year, Ravi Mehta from
the College of Business at Illinois and colleagues tested people’s
creativity while exposed to a soundtrack made up of background noises –
such as coffee-shop chatter and construction-site drilling – at
different volumes. They found that people were more creative when the
background noises were played at a medium level than when volume was
low. Loud background noise, however, damaged their creativity.
This
makes sense for a couple of reasons, says psychologist Dr Nick Perham,
at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who studies the effect of
sounds on learning but was not involved in the study. Firstly, he says,
sounds that are most distracting tend to be very variable. A general
hum in the background suggests a steady-state sound with not much
acoustical variation. “So there’s not much there to capture your
attention – nothing distracting the subjects,” he says. At the same
time, the background noise might cause the subjects to be in a slightly
heightened state of arousal, says Perham. You don’t want too much or too
little arousal. “Medium arousal is best for good performance. So it
might be that a general hum in the background gives an optimum level of
arousal.” With that in mind, Perham suggests there may be some benefit
to playing music or other sounds in an art class or other situations
where creativity is key.
Many teachers all over the world already
play music to students in class. Many are inspired by the belief that
hearing music can boost IQ in subsequent tasks,
the so-called Mozart effect.
While the evidence actually suggests it’s a stretch to say classical
music boosts brainpower, researchers do think pleasant sounds before a
task can sometimes lift your mood and help you perform well, says
Perham, who has done his own studies on the phenomenon. The key appears
to be that you enjoy what you’re hearing. “If you like the music or you
like the sound – even listening to a Stephen King novel – then you did
better. It didn’t matter about the music,” he says.
However, it’s
worth considering that music is not always helpful while you’re trying
to work. Trying to perform a task which involves serial recall – for
instance, doing mental arithmetic – will be impaired by sounds with
acoustic variation, which includes most types of music, says Perham.
(Except a few, like extreme death metal.) Songs with lyrics, on the
other hand, are more likely to interfere with tasks that involve
semantics – such as reading comprehension. “The task and the sound are
important, when you have both of them using the same process then you
get problems,” he says.
So, it seems that schools that choose to
screen out disturbing noises and create positive soundscapes could
enhance the learning of their students, so long as they make careful
choices.
This isn’t the only sense being tweaked to affect
learning. Special educational needs students at Sydenham high school in
London are being encouraged to revise different subjects in the presence
of different smells – grapefruit scents for maths, lavender for French
and spearmint for history.
Less research has gone into the idea of
whether scents can help with cognitive performance, although there have
been intriguing findings. In 2003, psychologist Mark Moss, at
Northumbria University, carried out a range of cognitive tests on
subjects who were
exposed either to lavender or rosemary aromas.
“Rosemary in particular caught my attention as it is considered to be
arousing and linked to memory,” he says, whereas lavender is considered
to be sedating. Moss found that those who were smelling lavender
performed significantly worse in working memory tests, and had impaired
reaction times for both memory and attention-based tasks, compared to
controls. Those in the rosemary group, on the other hand, did much
better than controls overall in the memory tasks, although their
reaction times were slower.
Why might this be? It’s perhaps not
surprising that smells affect memory, given that the brain’s olfactory
bulb is intimately linked to the hippocampus, which deals with learning.
But Moss suspected there was more to it. To explore the pharmacological
effects of rosemary on the body, he drew blood samples from volunteers
who had just undergone cognitive tests in a rosemary-infused room, and
found that they had elevated levels of a compound called 1,8-cineole in
their blood. Previous research has shown that this compound increases
communication between brain cells, which might explain how it improves
brain function.
So, as you finish reading this story, take a
moment to tune into your senses. Close your eyes and take a few nice
deep breaths. What can you hear and smell? The answer, it seems, may
affect how much you learnt in the past few minutes.
President Barack Obama said
Friday that the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed in Ukraine was
shot down in an "outrage of unspeakable proportion." He identified one
American who died in the crash as Quinn Lucas Schansman.
