The “Mozart Effect”
It’s crunch time and I have to read more research papers for my action research project before my final paper is due. Seeing as that is still some weeks away, well, it’s too early for all that stress yet. I’ll read them 2 days before the final paper is due – works for me.
While cruising for research I decided to go back and visit Dan Willingham’s site and what did I find there? This interesting discussion on the “Mozart Effect”.
…it began when a scientific paper reported that college students showed a short-lived increase in spatial reasoning (e.g., ability to mentally rotate objects) after listening to a Mozart piano sonata, compared to other students who experienced silence or instructions to relax (Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky, 1993). There were many subsequent efforts to reproduce the effect. Some were successful, most were not (see Chabris, 1999, for a review), and it appears most likely that when the effect is observed, it’s not due to hearing Mozart or classical music per se, but rather to a boost in mood and arousal (Thompson, Schellenberg, and Husain, 2001). At their best, the data on listening to Mozart supported a very short-lived boost in spatial ability for college students. Somehow, that transmogrified into the idea that playing classical music for babies would make them smarter for life…
And what is it that our fair city does with classical music, Mozart included? Why our local 711s pipe it outside to help get rid of the “teenage cluster effect” and the “riff-raff effect”. Our local upscale hotel pipes it outside to get rid of the local, not so upscale, “downtown colourful streetwalker effect”. There is a lot of people getting smarter here.
I appreciate the people like Dan Willingham who take educational theories and make them look like what many of them are: fashion fad’s from Paris Hilton!
Thank you, Dan, for making me look beyond the “fad” to see if the proof is really in the puddin’.
