It’s exam time, and in many homes, there’s a repeating argument that centers around how studying should happen. In my mind, it always sounds like the mother yelling at Fred Savage’s character in that old 1980 semi-animated, semi-claymation short, Dinosaurs! A Fun-Filled Trip Back In Time!
“Oh, how can anybody study with all that noise! Turn off that music, and go to bed!”
For that fictional character, the music may have inspired the dream that resulted in his report on dinosaurs.
For your child, though, is the music really helping, or is it serving as a distraction?
A Majority Of Students Say Music Helps Them Study
A study recently published in Psychology of Music found that a slight majority (54%) of university students said they liked to listen to music while studying or reading. The researchers cite other studies with similar results, or with even larger proportions of respondents reporting that they listen to music while studying.
Among those who do so, most believe that they study better or retain information better when they add music to the mix. Some say that music keeps them motivated to continue studying, or that it helps shut out the sort of outside noises that would distract them.
Notably, this study found no significant difference in study outcomes between students who preferred studying with music and those who preferred silence. Instead, they noticed that the biggest factor seemed to be students’ engagement with the music.
The Engagement Factor & Its Effect on Your Child’s Studying
It seems that a major factor here is how much your child’s brain is engaging with the music.
Some aspects include whether it’s music your child likes and whether it has lyrics. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that music with lyrics, especially when in the same language as the reading material, decreased reading performance compared with studying in silence.
Another, published in Psychology of Music in 2011, found that listening to music they didn’t enjoy significantly decreased students’ performance, whereas studying in silence, with a background of cafe sounds, or with music they did enjoy all had similar outcomes.
Altogether, this suggests that music that grabs your child’s attention, whether by being annoying or by having engaging lyrics, probably reduces the effectiveness of their studying.
Can Music Ever be Helpful For Studying, Then?
As seen above, music can sometimes be distracting, but it doesn’t always negatively affect reading comprehension or studying. That still leaves the question: can it ever have a positive effect?
One analysis published in Acta Psychologica in 2021 found that it may sometimes. Despite many studies showing negative effects, the researchers note that a few show positive effects, with caveats. For instance, calming instrumental background music has been shown to support memory and reading comprehension.
Results are also mixed regarding background music during spatial reasoning and logic tasks, with some studies showing positive effects, others showing no effect, and others showing detrimental effects.
The Compliance Factor
One aspect of this that’s really hard to test, though, is how much music may actually increase study time and willingness among some individuals.
For instance, maybe your teen hates studying and will find fifty other things to do in his room instead, but is willing to stick with it for the length of his favorite album, which results in him spending more time rehashing geometry or sentence structure than he would have otherwise.
That’s not exactly easy to fit into a lab test. The nearest thing may be a 2020 study published in Springer Nature, which did find that (preferred) background music reduced mind-wandering states (but didn’t find that it reduced reaction to external distractions).
What Does All Of This Mean For Your Teen?
Ultimately, there’s no consensus that music is universally good or bad for studying.
Instead, all the data we have, from study after study, suggest that some music (typically calming music the listener likes, without lyrics or other distracting factors) may have positive effects for some students, but not all.
Music that is distracting or disliked seems to pretty universally interfere with learning, reading comprehension, and subject retention.
However, music can serve as a motivating factor and sometimes help a listener stay on task.
For your teen, this means that the best balance may be to allow music if it fits these criteria, but call for it to be shut off if there are signs it’s distracting, and remove it if your child doesn’t seem to be staying on task while it plays.
