Download “The Mozart Effect”

“The Mozart Effect”
What is the “Mozart Effect”?
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“Music and Spatial Task Performance”
Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major
Stanford-Binet intelligence test
Significant rise in scores
Spatial-temporal reasoning
involves transforming and
comparing mental images in space
and time.
Popular Response
 Sold out in Boston
 Georgia’s governor gives free classical
music
 Tennessee followed
 Florida mandates day-cares
 New York: Mozart effect study room
 Don Campbell
Original Researchers
 Findings over-inflated
 Reanalyzed 1993 study
 Only PF&C task improved
Attempts to Replicate Effect
 Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices
(APM)
 Revised Minnesota Paper Form Board Test
 Backwards digit span task
Ambiguities
 APM tests using physical similarities
 Paper Form Board Test is a spatial
orientation test
 Backwards digit span task is “quasispatial”
Successful Study
 Paper Folding and Cutting subtest
 Mozart increased scores time and time
again
Why can’t the Mozart effect be
tested using science?
 Physics and Biology
 Spatial-temporal problems
Physics
 If a sky-diver jumped out of a plane in the
spread-eagle position and then pulled his
cord to release the parachute, would he be
accelerated once the parachute opened? If
so, in which direction?
Biology
 People with sickle-cell anemia have red
blood cells that have a defective sickle
shape to them. Malaria is caused by a
parasite that lives in the salivary glands of
the Anopheles mosquito and is passed into a
human as it feeds. This parasite uses red
blood cells to reproduce. Is it possible for
people with sickle-cell anemia to be
immune to malaria? Why or why not?
Benefits
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Critical thinking
Past knowledge
Set classroom atmosphere
Quiet a noisy room
In this day and age of new technology, we
sometimes fail to tackle the simplest of problems.
We worry more about having a perfect Power Point
presentation than ensuring that all the students are
focused on the learning task which is about to be
presented. We take them from a natural setting
which they have known most of their lives, the playground, and put them into an alien environment, the
classroom, and expect them to perform without fail.
Why not make their daily transition an easier one
with the help of Mozart? Why not help them
increase their test performance with a sonata?