Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Greta Munger is Associate Professor of Psychology at Davidson College whose works include The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. Dave Munger is a writer whose works include Researching Online and The Pocket Reader. And yes, he is married to Greta.
Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives?
Consider the typical doctor's office scenario: the doctor asks a breast cancer patient to decide on a treatment. "There's a 30 percent chance of recurrence in five years," she tells the patient, "but with chemotherapy, the chance is reduced to 10 percent." If the patient doesn't have a basic understanding of probability, she can't make an informed decision about whether to undergo treatment.
Doctors are likely to be better educated than the vast majority of their patients, so how does this discrepancy impact the way they share information about medical risk with their patients? Andrea Gurmankin Levy and Jonathan Baron devised a study to try to understand the difference between doctors' and patients' concept of medical risk.
Family lore has it that my uncle was influential in instituting what is now a fixture in college education: student evaluation of college instructors. He was class president at the University of Washington in the 1960s, when tensions between students and the school administrators were high, and he suggested implementing one of the first student course evaluation systems in the nation as a way to address the problem. Needless to say, the idea caught on.
While college faculty complain unceasingly about the fairness of the now nearly universal student course evaluation system (I did it myself, back when I taught college courses), it has in general been shown to be a relatively reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness, correlating positively with other measures such as faculty and administrator evaluation, as well as actual student learning.
From the teacher's perspective, however, the students can't possibly have enough information to make an effective evaluation of their teaching. A college course represents just a tiny sliver of the total knowledge in a discipline, and even after a semester in a college course, students are in no position to make judgements that will impact a faculty member's entire career.
A 1993 study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal found just the opposite: students actually need much less information to make judgements that accurately predict end-of-semester evaluations.
Yesterday's post brings up an interesting question: How can you be unaware of having even seen an image, and yet be able to make reliable judgments about that image? That article is just one example of a variety of situations in which people can be unaware of seeing something, even immediately after being given a quick glimpse of it, yet behave as if they have seen it.
We discussed how visual images can be "masked" -- flashed quickly and then followed by another image which is displayed for a longer period. Though observers had no conscious recollection of seeing faces, they still could make accurate judgments about the attractiveness of the faces they had seen. Earlier experiments have found that the ability of the skin to conduct electricity as well as responses in the amygdala region of the brain can be affected by these masked images, again, with no conscious knowledge on the part of the viewer of having seen the image.
So how can our skin and brain respond to the image without our being conscious of seeing it? A team led by J.S. Morris developed a procedure to find out. Since the amygdala is activated during a fear response, they first conditioned volunteers to be afraid of a black and white photo of man with an angry facial expression. They used photos of four different men, two angry, and two neutral. These photos flashed randomly on the screen at intervals of around 20 seconds. When one (and only one) of the angry photos was displayed, a 1-second burst of white noise was played at a level of 100 decibels (loud enough to make you jump, but not to hurt your ears). Each face was shown six times.
Can you tell the difference between the images below?
At first, they just look like fuzzy diagonal lines -- there doesn't appear to be a significant difference between them. But if you look at them closely, you begin to notice that the images at the top of the picture (category A) tend to have single dark bands, while the images towards the bottom have dark bands that come in pairs. The "phase angle" refers to the technique used to generate the images, and based on this angle, the images can be divided into two categories.
With a lot of work, people can be trained to quickly distinguish between these categories. The training, on a computer, involves showing the images over and over again, requiring participants to place each image in category A or B. Then, if these trained "experts" at categorizing fuzzy lines (actually called compound gratings) are tested by showing them two gratings at the same time and asking if they are the same or different, a curious result occurs. People who've been trained to categorize the gratings are much better at distinguishing between gratings in different categories than they are when the gratings are in the same category. But if the images are rotated by 90 degrees (so they are slanted to the left, instead of the right), the training advantage disappears:
In 1973, a massive study of almost 400,000 Dutch men appeared to confirm what anecdotal evidence and even some scientific research had led scholars to suspect: The first-born child in a family tends to be the most intelligent. The researchers, Lillian Belmont and Francis Marolla, found that within a given family size, earlier-born children tended to have slightly higher IQs than later-born children, even after controlling for social class. Their study pool was the entire population of 19-year-old men in the Netherlands.
Since then, researchers have developed all sorts of models to try to explain why it is that first-born children have higher IQs. But recently, a few studies have begun to question the methods Belmont and Marolla used to analyze the Dutch data. Their study was cross-sectional: they weren't actually studying children from the same family; they simply took all the 19-year-olds and analyzed their IQ data in conjunction with information about their family and demographics.
But same-family research also suffers from problems. It's difficult to compare the IQ of a 7-year-old to a 14-year-old: typically children are compared with other kids their same age, which by definition would preclude comparing siblings based on birth order. Even if you measure IQs of the children in a family as they pass an age milestone, that family's economic status may have changed, so economic status becomes more difficult to control for.
We've written before about how stereotypes can impair performance on math tests: for example, when women are told they are taking a math test for a study about gender differences in math ability, they perform more poorly than men. However, if they are first taught about how stereotypes can impair performance, their scores rise to equality with men.
But what about the other side of the stereotype spectrum? When people are expected to perform better due to a stereotype, how do those expectations affect performance? One possible answer is that they will perform even better. Another possibility is that they'll choke under the pressure of living up to their reputed ability.
To try to differentiate between these two possibilities, Sapna Cheryan and Galen Bodenhausen tested three groups of Asian-American women, all college students who had indicated that it was important for them to do well in math. Each group took the same math test composed of questions from the Graduate Record Exam (the GRE—a standardized admissions test for U.S. graduate schools). However, before the exam, the groups were administered three different questionnaires, designed to focus participants on one of three aspects of their identity: ethnicity, gender, or individual identity. The questions, while not specifically invoking stereotypes such as the idea that Asian-Americans are better than average at math or that women perform poorly in math, certainly invited participants to invoke those impressions, with statements like "overall, my race is considered good by others."
Here are the results:
Asian women who took the survey focusing on ethnicity performed significantly worse on the math test than those who took the individual-focus questionnaire. There was no difference between the individual survey group and the gender survey group.
Cheryan and Bodenhausen also found that the ethnicity group had a significantly lower ability to concentrate than the other groups in the study—in fact, this difference explained most of the difference between the ethnicity group and other groups. Cheryan and Bodenhausen claim that Asian-Americans' "model minority" status—as a minority group that fits in and even excels in a Caucasian-dominated society—often leads to overwhelming pressure to succeed. They cite research by Ho, Driscoll, and Loosbrock, which found that math problems were given fewer points by graders for Asian-American students than European-Americans who gave the same answer. Since the penalty for failure appears to be larger for Asian Americans, it's no wonder that they have difficulty concentrating when their ethnicity is highlighted.
The impact of stereotypes clearly is complex—we've reported on positive, negative, and neutral effects (as in the case of gender here). Perhaps this experiment's findings on Asian-American women won't be replicated with other groups. What's certain is that stereotypes do have an important impact on performance. It's possible that the most important reminder this study may offer is not to put too much faith in the results of a single test, whether it purports to measure math ability, IQ, or some other skill.
Cheryan, S., & Bodenhausen, G.V. (2000). When positive stereotypes threaten intellectual performance: The psychological hazards of "model minority" status. Psychological Science, 11(5), 399-402.
IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.
Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman estimate that for every ten articles on intelligence and academic achievement, there has been fewer than one about self-discipline. Even so, the small body of research on self-discipline suggests that it has a significant impact on achievement. Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds' ability to delay gratification (for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was predictive of academic achievement a decade later. Others have found links between personality and college grades, and self-discipline and Phi Beta Kappa awards. Still, most research on self-discipline has achieved inconsistent results, possibly due to the difficulty of measuring self-discipline. Could a more robust measure of self-discipline demonstrate that it's more relevant to academic performance than IQ?
To address this question, Duckworth and Seligman conducted a two-year study of eighth graders, combining several measures of self-discipline for a more reliable measure, and also assessing IQ, achievement test scores, grades, and several other measures of academic performance. Using this better measure of self-discipline, they found that self-discipline was a significantly better predictor of academic performance 7 months later than IQ.
How did they arrive at this result? They studied a group of 8th-graders at the beginning of the school year. They used five different measures of self-discipline: the Eysenck Junior Impulsiveness scale (a 23-question survey about impulsive behavior), the Brief Self-Control Scale (13 questions measuring thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance), two questionnaires in which parents and teachers rated the student's self-discipline, and a version of Mischel's delay of gratification task. Students were given an envelope containing $1, and were told they could spend it immediately or bring it back in a week for a $2 reward. The students were also given an IQ test (OLSAT7, level G).
At the end of the school year, students were surveyed again and several measures of academic performance were taken. The data included final GPA (grade point average), a spring achievement test, whether they had been admitted to the high school of their choice, and number of hours they spent on homework. All except two measures correlated more strongly to self-discipline than to IQ. Scores on spring achievement tests were correlated both to self-discipline and IQ, but there wasn't a significant difference. Duckworth and Seligman suggest that this could be partially due to the fact that achievement tests are similar in format to IQ tests. The other area where there was no significant difference was in school absenses.
Most impressive was the whopping .67 correlation between self-discipline and final GPA, compared to a .32 correlation for IQ. This graph dramatically shows the difference between the two measures:
Both IQ and self-discipline are correlated with GPA, but self-discipline is a much more important contributor: those with low self-discipline have substantially lower grades than those with low IQs, and high-discipline students have much better grades than high-IQ students. Even after adjusting for the student's grades during the first marking period of the year, students with higher self-discipline still had higher grades at the end of the year. The same could not be said for IQ. Further, the study found no correlation between IQ and self-discipline—these two traits varied independently.
This is not to say this study will end the debate on IQ and heredity. The study says nothing about whether self-discipline is heritable. Further, the self-discipline might be correlated differently with achievement for different populations; this study covered only eighth graders in a relatively privileged school. Perhaps self-discipline has a different role at other ages, or in more diverse populations (though the study group was quite ethnically diverse—52% White, 31% Black, 12% Asian, and 4% Latino). Perhaps the most important question which remains is how best to teach children self-discipline—or whether it can be taught at all.
Duckworth, A.L., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944.
Now, can you identify the musical style of each clip?
If you said "Classical," you're technically only correct for the first clip. The second clip is actually in the Romantic style (bonus points for identifying the works and composers in the comments!). While both are examples of the classical genre, classical music is also divided into styles corresponding roughly to historical periods: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Post-Romantic. Traditionally, only trained musicians have been regarded as being able to easily distinguish between these styles.
But is that ability merely due to musicians' familiarity with individual musical compositions, or is there something about the underlying structure of the music that enables musicians to tell the difference more readily than non-musicians? If the musical structure accounts for the difference, then can non-musicians easily be trained to recognize it, or is extensive musical training required?
Simone Dalla Bella and Isabelle Peretz found an innovative way to address those questions. Simply playing clips like the ones above gives trained musicians an unfair advantage, because they are more likely to be familiar with the specific musical composition. Instead, the researchers had a professional composer write four new compositions in each of the four major styles of classical music. They analyzed each piece for musical similarities and differences, and then played them for three different groups of volunteers: non-musicians familiar with Western music (Canadian college students); trained musicians familiar with Western music (music students at the University of Montreal); and non-musicians unfamiliar with Western music (exchange students from China who had spent less than two years in Canada).
They played the clips, about 30 seconds long each, in pairs. Participants were asked to rate each pair on a scale for similarity, with 1 being "very different" and 7 being "very similar." If training offered a special advantage, then Western musicians should more be able to more readily observe the differences between different musical styles. Further, they should rate music that comes from more distant historical periods as more different than non-musicians. Here are the results:
As you can see, Western musicians did identify the most differences between styles, but even non-Western non-musicians were able to successfully see larger differences between styles that were more historically distant.
A deeper analysis of the data found that all participants were using the same musical criterion to distinguish between styles: the variation in duration of notes, which was measured in two ways. First, the researchers measured the length of each note in a composition and then calculated the standard deviation of this length (a range around the average note length in which most notes fell)—the larger this measure, the more variation in note length occurred. Next, they measured the variability of the difference in length between neighboring notes. Again, the larger this measure, the more variability between notes. The similarity ratings of experts and novices alike correlated strongly to these two measures.
Western musicians with extensive musical training did rely to a certain extent on tonal differences, but even without this training, non-musicians can easily identify different musical styles. So it appears that everyone can discern the differences between musical styles with a minimum of training.
Dalla Bella, S., & Peretz, I. (2005). Differentiation of classical music requires little learning but rhythm. Cognition, 96, B65-B78.
Eric Durbrow pointed me to this article in the Globe and Mail. Its lead sentence offers a surprising claim:
Parents take note: Reading to your preschoolers before bedtime doesn't mean they are likely to learn much about letters, or even how to read words.
But aren't teachers and literacy advocates constantly urging parents to read to their kids? Aren't their entreaties backed by research?
The Globe and Mail article reports on research published in Psychological Science by Mary Ann Evans and Jean Saint-Aubin. I decided to look at the original article to see if it lives up to the dramatic claim offered in the mainstream media report.
Evans and Saint-Aubin note in the introduction to their experiments that little research has been done specifically focusing on the relationship between shared book reading and orthographic development. In other words, while there have been studies about parents reading to their kids, these studies don't specifically examine how kids learn about the shape of letters and how letters form words. So there may be some cause for concern.
The Globe and Mail article does offer a good summary of Evans and Saint-Aubin's work. They tracked the eye movements of 4-year-olds as their parents read picture books to them from a computer screen. Despite using several different types of books, including books where the text was enclosed in conversation bubbles superimposed on the illustrations comic-book style, the children rarely looked at the words on the page. They generally looked at the pictures more than 20 times as often as they looked at the words. Evans and Saint-Aubin quite reasonably ask how these children could possibly be learning anything about words or reading.
The Globe and Mail article quotes Evans as saying that parents believe that reading to their kids will help them learn to read. "That's true to an extent in that reading to your children will help them develop an understanding of storyline. But it's not necessarily helping them to learn how to decode the words on the page."
Does the research really suggest that reading to children only helps kids understand "storyline"? In their second experiment, Evans and Saint-Aubin had teachers read two different versions of the same story to a new group of children, again monitoring eye movements. In the modified story, the text was changed to refer to specific details in the pictures. On pages with references to specific picture details, children looked at the corresponding area of the picture nearly the entire time the page was being read. This suggests that the kids are paying close attention to the meaning of the text in the story. Wouldn't that at least help children develop vocabulary skills?
Indeed it would, and Evans and Saint-Aubin cite two meta-analyses and three studies showing that reading to children correlates with vocabulary knowledge. While vocabulary may be important for parents, for psychologists, language ability is a separate skill from reading ability. However, while the five articles that Evans and Saint-Aubin cite find that there is a stronger impact on vocabulary than on reading achievement, each study does show some association between shared reading to preschoolers and school-aged reading ability.
Evans and Saint-Aubin argue that this small effect may be due to the fact that parents who read to their children are also more likely to specifically coach their children in orthographic skills. Perhaps this is true—perhaps it is the coaching, and not the shared reading, which leads to improved reading ability in school-aged kids.
But is the Globe and Mail article's lead sentence warranted—does reading to children really lead to no improvement in reading ability? From a psychology research perspective, it's arguable that it does not. But for parents trying to help their children develop the skills that will help them in the future, the question may be irrelevant. Developing vocabulary skills and a love of books are important in their own right. In the long run, these skills may lead to better readers: Evans and Saint-Aubin's report doesn't address long-term development.
Finally, I would argue that children whose parents read to them to are substantially more likely to learn to read—because if no reading occurs, then there is much less opportunity for coaching. As Evans points out in her interview with the Globe and Mail, one of the simplest ways to coach children on reading skills is to point to the words while we read them.
Evans, M.A., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2005) What children are looking at during shared storybook reading: Evidence from eye movement monitoring. Psychological Science, 16(11), 913-920.
How do we reconcile the variety of results that have been found with respect to the Mozart effect—the idea that the music of Mozart can lead to improved performance on spatial ability tests? With some researchers appearing to have found no effect at all, and others claiming dramatic effects, who are we to believe? In just the research we've reviewed here at Cognitive Daily, we've got Ivanov and Geake reporting a pronounced effect for both Mozart and Bach, Jackson and Tlauka arguing that there's no Mozart effect for route learning, and McKelvie and Low declaring "final curtains for the Mozart effect."
These studies all make different claims, but now some researchers believe they have found a common thread. The music causing the effect isn't limited to Mozart: Bach and Schubert effects have been documented. In both the Jackson and Tlauka study and the McKelvie and Low research, the experimenters compared different types of music (Philip Glass and Aqua) to Mozart, but didn't include a non-musical control, so it's possible that all these types of music produce the effect. So what kind of music doesn't lead to the effect?
A team of researchers led by Gabriela Husain may have found the answer. They note that previous research has established that people score better on cognitive measures when they are in a good mood and/or are in an aroused state. Perhaps all these different types of music either arouse people or put them in a positive mood. Several studies have established that a fast tempo leads to arousal, and that works played in a minor key can induce a negative mood.
Building on this research, Husain and her colleagues decided to systematically alter the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos and test people's spatial ability, mood, and arousal levels after listening to the different versions. They had a skilled pianist play the sonata into a MIDI sequencer, allowing them to easily manipulate tempo. They created a fast version (165 beats per minute [bpm], or about 35 percent faster than the score) and a slow version (60 bpm, half as fast as the score). Next, they took each version and transposed it to a minor key (from D major to D minor), taking care to fix several odd-sounding notes resulting from the process. Volunteers were divided into four groups, each of which listened to a different version of the sonata before taking the paper folding and cutting test that purports to measure spatial ability. Here are the results:
There was a significant difference between scores of participants who listened to the fast versions compared to the slow versions. The highest scores were achieved by the fast/major group, and by far the lowest scores came from the slow/minor group. But how did these results compare to the arousal and mood scores? The groups listening to the fast versions were more aroused, and groups listening to major versions were in more positive moods than those listening to minor key versions. In fact, 58 percent of the variation in the results on the spatial reasoning test were attributable to mood, arousal, or enjoyment of the music. Differences in musical structure, by comparison, accounted to just 12 percent of the variation.
Husain et al. argue that it's the changes in mood and arousal which account for the improvement in spatial abilities—and music is not the only way to affect mood and arousal. Just giving someone a candy bar, for example, will reliably improve their mood, but we don't talk about a "candy bar effect." It's certainly possibly that the 12 percent variation in the data attributable to musical structure may be the result of some small "Mozart effect," but Husain and her colleagues believe it's more likely that this result is simply an artifact of imperfect measurement of mood, arousal, and spatial ability.
So what's the bottom line? Should parents invest hundreds of dollars exposing their kids to classical music, in order to make them "smarter"? It probably won't hurt, but the data suggest that what's more important is to make sure your kids approach tests with a positive attitude. Of course, as the parent of a 13-year-old whose mood typically ranges from glum to glummer, I know that's often easier said than done.
Husain, G., Thompson, W. F., & Schellenberg, E. G. (2002). Effects of musical tempo and mode on arousal, mood and spatial abilities. Music Perception, 20(2), 151-171.
One of my best friends in college played music incessantly—whether he was studying, writing papers, completing organic chemistry problem sets, or swilling down cheap beer, whatever he did was accompanied by a nonstop 1980s synth-pop beat. This apparently did him no harm, because after graduating at the top of his class, he went on to get a PhD and a law degree, with full scholarships paying for both.
I could never study with him because the music always broke my concentration. I preferred to study to the gentle background noise of the campus coffee shop. There was one exception to this rule: when I was writing a paper, I would always play Mozart's Piano Concerto #23. Perhaps it was just superstition, but I really believed it helped me concentrate. Even playing a Mozart symphony did not produce the same effect for me—only the piano music worked.
A few years after I graduated from college, the research of Rauscher et al. appeared to back up my superstition—listening to Mozart's piano music actually raised spatial IQ scores. But, as I noted a few days ago, the data collected subsequently on the "Mozart effect" has been mixed, and several prominent researchers have pronounced "final curtains" or a "requiem" for the Mozart effect.
But what of my own experiences writing papers (which I still employ sometimes when inspiration founders—though I've now expanded my collection to include concertos 9, 21, 22, 25, and 27)? And what of the research that did show an effect? Where is that coming from?
Some recent research has begun to find answers. I'll discuss two such studies today, and a third next week. First, Vesna Ivanov and John Geake studied three classrooms of 5th and 6th graders. For one class, Mozart's sonata for two pianos was played both before and during the standard paper folding and cutting task used for nearly all Mozart effect research. In this task, a piece of paper is folded several times, and then holes are punched in it. Students must imagine where the holes will be when the paper is unfolded. The second class listened to Bach's Toccata in G major while completing the task, and the third class took the test in silence. Here are their results:
While they found no difference between Mozart and Bach, both classes that listened to music performed better on the test than the class that worked in silence. So apparently the Mozart effect isn't limited to Mozart. Indeed, the effect has also been found with the music of Schubert, and even the new age performer Yanni (apparently no one has yet tested '80s synth pop). Ivanov and Geake offer some interesting guesses as to why the music improves performance. They point to Rausher's argument that cognitive processing levels remain essentially the same while listening to Mozart's music. They also suspect that music may help to mask the otherwise distracting background noise that is present in nearly all "silent" classrooms.
Trying to sort through the varied results on the Mozart effect, Catherine Jackson and Michael Tlauka conducted a study in which they used a different task: instead of a paper folding task, participants negotiated through a virtual maze on a computer screen. They noted that other researchers had found the effect with paper-and-pencil mazes, so it seemed likely that Mozart might also improve performance on virtual mazes.
Jackson and Tlauka's participants did the task twice: once after listening to Mozart's piano sonata, and once while listening to Philip Glass's Music with Changing Parts. None of the participants did the task following a period of silence. While the participants were able to learn the maze, the Mozart music did not lead to an improvement compared to the Philip Glass. Jackson and Tlauka argue that this means the Mozart effect is not generalizable—if it's only valuable for pencil and paper tasks, then what real-world application could it possibly have.
But one interesting thing to note about these two studies is that they're not really finding anything different. Both studies found that different music can lead to improvements in special reasoning. Since Jackson and Tlauka did not include a "silent" condition in their study, we don't know if their results are any different from Ivanov and Geake.
What these two studies do reveal is that Mozart's music isn't unique—that other music can have a similar effect. But the studies can only offer guesses as to why there does seem to be some effect of listening to music on spatial reasoning. I'll continue to explore this issue next week.
Ivanov, V.K., & Geake, J.G. (2003). The Mozart effect and primary school children. Psychology of Music, 31(4), 405-413.
Jackson, C.S., & Tlauka, M. (2004). Route-learning and the Mozart effect. Psychology of Music, 32(2), 213-220.
The "Mozart Effect" hit the mainstream media by storm in the mid 1990s, in the form of a bestselling book by the same name. A Google search for the topic still reveals a slew of products designed to exploit the effect—to increase IQ, or overall well-being, or even physical health.
The psychological basis for the effect is a 1993 study by a team led by Frances Rauscher, which found a much more limited effect: scores on a spatial IQ test were 8 to 9 points higher after listening to a Mozart sonata, compared to testing following exposure to relaxation stimuli. The result was astounding: simply listening to Mozart could actually improve test scores. Rauscher and her colleagues have been careful to point out that the effect is short-lived, is limited to specific measures of spatial IQ, and may not be of any practical use, but these caveats didn't stop sales of Mozart CDs from skyrocketing.
Since that time, many researchers have attempted to replicate the effect, with varying degrees of success. Bruce Rideout was able to match Rauscher et al.'s results in several studies, but a team led by Kenneth Steele, using a somewhat different methodology, was not.
Searching for a more definitive answer, Pippa McKelvie and Jason Low decided to try both Rideout's and Steele's methodology in the same study. There were a few key differences, however. In their testing, Steele, Rideout, and Rauscher had all tested college students, but McKelvie and Low tested 11- to 13-year-olds (this makes sense, given that most "Mozart effect" merchandise is marketed to parents of young children). In experiment 1, designed to match Steele's methods, McKelvie and Low also addressed a Rauscher criticism of Steele's research. Steele had compared listening to Mozart to listening to a standup comic routine and found no difference in spatial abilities. Rauscher suggested that listening to a contrasting musical form might yield better results. So in their task, McKelvie and Low used repetitive dance music by the group Aqua to compare to Mozart.
Students were divided into two groups—one which listened to Aqua first, and the other which listened to Mozart first. After listening to an 8-minute musical excerpt, students were tested on spatial ability. Then they listened to the other excerpt and took a different version of the same test. The result: no significant difference for any of the music. All the test scores were statistically the same. There wasn't even a trend for Mozart.
In experiment 2, designed to match Rideout's methods, a more complex design was used. The major difference was that Rideout's procedure involved a relaxation sequence instead of contrasting music. However, while Rideout's relaxation tape involved verbal cues for relaxation, McKelvie and Low used a musical relaxation CD—selections from Debussey's Clair de Lune. Eight different variations comparing both Mozart and Aqua to the relaxation sequence were made, and none of them resulted in significant differences.
Where does this leave us? McKelvie and Low argue that this means there really is no Mozart effect. The only major difference between their replication and Rideout's procedure was the use of musical rather than verbal relaxation sequences. If contrasting music doesn't result in lower IQ scores, then we're really not talking about Mozart enhancing spatial IQ scores, we're talking about verbal relaxation tapes inhibiting them. In any case, the Mozart effect is clearly so limited that it's probably not worth parents' or researchers' time trying to coax out an effect. Surely actual studying and learning will have a greater positive impact than trying to decide on the perfect pre-test music.
McKelvie, P., and Low, 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.
"Boys are better at math" is a stereotype decades in the making, and it has in some cases been borne out by testing measures such as the SAT. The stereotype has been around so long that many wonder whether the stereotype is the effect or the cause of any actual differences in math ability.
Many researchers have observed a "stereotype threat," which occurs when test-takers are made aware that they are being tested in an area in which the stereotype suggests they'll do poorly. For example, when boys and girls are given a math test and told that its purpose is to determine whether boys or girls are better at math, girls will do worse than when they take the same test and aren't made aware of any stereotypes.
Simply distracting the test-takers from the stereotype by falsely attributing any test anxiety to something else about the testing environment has been shown to be enough remove the stereotype threat. Michael Johns, Toni Schmader, and Andy Martens were impressed by this phenomenon, but didn't like the implication that you have to lie to test-takers in order to create a level playing field. So they tried something different. In a Psychological Science study, they attempted to "distract" female test-takers by teaching them about stereotype threat itself.
They tested three groups of male and female college students. In the first group, they told participants they were administering a "problem solving" test to assess general cognitive ability. In the second group, participants were told it was a "math test" to learn about gender differences in math ability. Finally, the third group was taught briefly about stereotype threat and indicated that any anxiety the women were feeling about taking the test may be due to stereotypes against women and were unrelated to their actual math ability.
Of course, each group was actually given the same test, composed of problems taken from the GRE quantitative exam. After taking the test, participants filled out a brief questionnaire in which they described their attitudes about stereotypes and provided their actual score on the mat SAT test.
Johns, Schmader, and Martens adjusted the test scores to account for differences in SAT and came up with the following results:
As expected, women scored dramatically lower when the test was described as a math test to study gender differences compared to scores on the (identical) "problem solving" test. But when they were alerted to stereotype threat, their scores rose again, to a level equivalent with the male test-takers. Simply alerting women to the possibility of stereotype threat completely eliminated the threat!
Johns, M., Schmader, T., & Martens, A. (2005). Knowing is half the battle: Teaching stereotype threat as a means of improving women's math performance. Psychological Science, 16(5), 175-179.
Though you'll never hear her tell you, Greta is an excellent musician. She's a brilliant English horn and oboe player, and she can also handle the piano keyboard. When a nonmusician hears her play, they'll often tell her how they wished their parents had made them practice when they were younger (unfortunately, our kids Jim and Nora don't seem to appreciate this logic when we tell them it's time to practice!). Everyone appreciates a good musician, but if the responses of our own children are any indication, few of us are willing to put in the practice it takes to learn to perform well.
We all seem to have an intuitive sense that learning to play music is "good for you," but what does the research say? Many studies have indicated that there is a correlation between music lessons such positive traits as memory, mathematics achievement, and even reading ability, but does this correlation result from the music lessons themselves, or simply being fortunate enough to have parents that make you practice? Maybe parents who make their kids practice also put more emphasis on doing homework. Maybe musical ability is related to general intelligence—so it's the reading and math skills that make good musicians, and not the other way around.
E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto developed a study to try to find a causal link between music lessons and intelligence ("Music Lessons Enhance IQ", Psychological Science, 2004). In his experiment, six-year-olds were randomly selected to participate in keyboard, voice, and drama lessons for one year and compared with a group of kids who took no lessons. All the children took IQ tests at the beginning and end of the study. Since the children were selected randomly, there was no chance that the parents' influence would account for the difference between kids. The following chart shows the change in the each group's IQ over the course of the study:
All children participating in the study showed a rise in IQ, which Schellenberg attributes to the fact that they were all just starting kindergarten (and notice that this component of the IQ increase is bigger than any other effect). However, the kids who took music lessons did show a significantly greater IQ rise than both the kids in drama lessons or the kids with no lessons. The fact that taking drama lessons does not also increase IQ shows that the type of lessons matter: just any lessons outside of school won't help. So it appears that music lessons aren't merely valuable for teaching musical skills; they also transfer that benefit onto general intelligence.
It's important to note that "intelligence" as measured by IQ tests isn't the only worthwhile ability. The children in drama class, for example, demonstrated improvements in adaptive social behavior during the same period (and this was the only group with such an increase). This type of behavior, as noted in a recent Cognitive Daily article, can lead to improved academic achievement later in school.
Every parent wants his or her child to do well in school. They help the kids with their homework, volunteer in the classroom, do everything they can think of to help their children succeed. But what type of elementary school education actually leads to older kids who do better in school? Typically students are tested at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and if they improve, their educational program is labeled as successful. This type of assessment, though valuable, sheds little light on what happens in the long run.
A team of researchers led by Gian Vittorio Caprara sought to measure educational progress over a longer period of time, five years, to see what factors were most important in student achievement (Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbarnelli, Concetta Pastorelli, and Albert Bandura, University of Rome; and Philip Zimbardo, Stanford University, "Prosocial Foundations of Children's Academic Achievement," Psychological Science, 2000). They studied four separate cohorts of third graders, tracking them all the way through the eighth grade. By studying separate cohorts—groups of same-aged kids starting in different years—they hoped to eliminate possible impacts of historical events on a group (for example, a group starting in September 2001 might have a significantly different profile from a group starting in a different year, due to the impact of the attacks of September 11).
When the kids were third graders, they were asked to rate themselves and their classmates on measures of prosocial behavior (cooperativeness, helpfulness, sharing, and kindness) and aggression (fighting, hurting, and teasing). Teachers also rated each child and assessed academic achievement. The same measures were taken when the kids reached eighth grade, five years later.
The graphic below shows the significant correlations the researchers found:
What's most surprising about the results is that prosocial behavior was a more important predictor of future academic success than academic achievement. When the impact of prosocial behavior was accounted for, academic achievement in third grade did not significantly contribute to academic achievement in eighth grade. Further, the influence of third grade aggression on eighth grade academic achievement was nonsignificant.
Caprera et al. also point out that prosocial behavior is not simply a substitute for general intelligence. Intelligence correlates only weakly with prosocial behavior, accounting for just 16 percent of the variance in prosocialness. They suggest that fostering academic achievement over the long term might have more to do with establishing an environment in school where kids take an active role in helping each other learn.
As every high-school senior knows, many colleges and universities take "racial diversity" into account when selecting students for admission. The practice is controversial, because it could mean that qualified students are denied admission, and those who are admitted must tolerate other students with a less rigorous academic background. The institutions often argue that their admissions practices are justified because increased diversity creates a more effective learning environment.
There is some research backing these claims: schools with greater racial diversity tend to have better retention, satisfaction, and intellectual development. However, most of the data is correlational—it's unclear whether diversity caused the positive results, or vice versa. A team of researchers led by Anthony Lising Antonio developed an experimental study to see if they could find a causal link between racial diversity and student achievement (see comments for the full citation).
They placed white student volunteers into groups based on a preliminary survey about their opinions on controversial issues. Students were placed in groups with others they agreed with. However, in each group, in addition to the three naive volunteers, there was also a "confederate"—a student who followed a script that either agreed with or contradicted the professed opinions of the others in the group. Half of the confederates were Black.
Before the groups met, each participant wrote an essay for 15 minutes on their pre-screened social issue (either child labor in developing countries or the death penalty). Then they met with their discussion group to discuss the issue. Then the participants wrote another essay on the same topic. Finally, they wrote a third essay on the topic that their group had not discussed.
Unfortunately the results of the study will probably do little to diminish the controversy over racial diversity in college admissions. The essays were rated by a panel of three judges for "integrative complexity" (IC), which is a measure of how well the essay incorporates multiple perspectives and is associated with higher achievement in college students. The post-discussion essays had significantly higher ICs when the confederate disagreed with the other members of the group, but not when the confederate was simply of a different race.
However, when students wrote on child labor for the third essay (meaning the group had been discussing capital punishment), then white students in groups with Black confederates wrote essays with higher ICs compared to those in groups with white confederates. Though the same result was not found when the third topic was the death penalty, this result does suggest that in some instances, the mere fact of racial diversity in a group can lead to improved writing.
By far the researchers' most significant finding was one that simply matched previous research: students who had a more racially diverse group of friends and classmates outside of the study tended to write essays with higher ICs. Again, however, this finding is only a correlation, and cannot on its own show that racial diversity improves learning. Although this study is a good start, perhaps a study that provides participants more than an hour or so interaction with members of a different race will give a more definitive answer.
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