At the peak of the 2020 pandemic, remote learning has ushered in, and face-to-face classes became a thing of the past. For many students, adjusting to this new mode of learning was a daunting task. The average student began to struggle to keep up with classes and over time, passing on assignments to an essay writer became rampant.
However, there was another group of students that somehow managed to navigate the murky waters of remote learning through music. Indeed, music has often been touted as a powerful teaching tool that helps create a memorable educational experience for students. But how true is this theory? In this article, we will explore the influence of music on remote learning for students.
What are the benefits of music for online learning?
Integrating music into formal education (remote or physical) has a wide range of benefits. Some of these include:
Eased students’ stress
For many students, the learning process can be stressful. It’s even worse when you’re trying to learn online in the middle of a pandemic. However, studies have shown that music can be quite beneficial for relieving stress. It’s a powerful tool for reducing stress levels in both healthy students and students with health problems.
According to The University of Maryland Medical center, students should listen to music if they’re struggling with learning-induced stress. Research shows that listening to soothing music can decrease heart rate, blood pressure, and anxiety levels in heart patients. This finding reveals just how powerful music can be to the mind and body.
Improved social skills and collaboration
Social interaction and communication has taken a pretty big hit from remote learning. However, integrating music into the learning process can change all of that. According to Dr. Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of child psychiatry, music supports language, social development and collaboration.
A 2015 study shows that music certainly has a special effect on social/emotional skills and collaboration. In this study, a group of researchers randomly assigned toddlers into two groups: a musical and a control group.
The toddlers in the musical group participated in a wide range of interactive musical activities that demonstrated how to show emotions. The toddlers in the control group went through the same training but without music.
At the end of the study, the toddlers in the first group showed more connectedness and collaboration. They were in sync and had learned to match sad expressions to sad musical features. Their counterparts in the control group, however, were quite the opposite.
This just goes to show that music can help students feel less disconnected from the learning process while improving their social and collaborative skills.
Improved focus
Over the years, many have argued that music can be distracting for students. As such, many teachers and educators are often skeptical about integrating music into the learning process. However, a 2007 Stanford study proved this theory wrong by revealing that music actually moves the brain to pay attention.
For most students learning online in the middle of a pandemic, it can be hard to focus on classes when there are tons of distracting elements around (the TV, video games, etc). Nevertheless, music engages the areas of the brain involved in paying attention and helps students categorize information. This way, they’ll be able to focus better on their classes.
Bettered brain functions
Music has been proven to improve cognitive functions or enhance performance on cognitive tasks. An old study revealed that listening to music helped students to complete more questions within the time allotted and also get their answers right.
Thus, by integrating music into the learning process, you’ll have better performing students and less “Please write my essay” requests.
How to Integrate Music into Remote Learning
Knowing the benefits of music for remote learning is one thing; incorporating it into a lesson plan is another thing. If you’re a teacher who’s considering integrating music into the learning process, here are a few valuable ideas that could guide you:
Set the mood with music
In the film industry, music can cause a change in the mood of the movie. This explains why filmmakers switch the music occasionally to match each scene. In much the same way, you could use music to set the mood of each class. Use music as a transition from one subject to another. Switching from math to creative writing? Use a theme song to make the switch. You could also have very soft music playing in the background.
Give music breaks
One disadvantage of remote learning is that students rarely have the time to get up and exercise. As such, you can have intermittent breaks where you play music and have students dance, like they are on the runaway show taking into account all the modern fashion trends to the tune. This will be great for re-energizing them and putting them in a better mood for learning.
Final Thoughts
Now that we’ve established that music can be beneficial for remote learning, it’s time to start integrating it into the learning process. Hopefully, when the pandemic is over, we’ll see an influx of better-performing, stress-free students.