THE IMPACT OF MUSIC-BASED LEARNING ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

New perspectives in education require development of innovative teaching and learning practices capable of responding to the latest twenty-first century challenges. Music-based approach to learning might be one of them. The aim of this work is to comprehend the role of music in university classroom and its influence on student achievement. To address this research objective, an empirical study was conducted, consisting of two phases. During the first phase, an experiment was carried out and a class of 24 students was divided in two different groups, i.e. treatment and control group, composed of 12 students each. While the treatment group was subject to listening to a song in classroom before the lecture delivery, the control group did not listen to any song. Afterwards, both groups attended the class regularly and were asked to respond to a short test regarding the lecture topic at the end of the class. The results revealed that the treatment group performed better than the control group, as 11 out of 12 participants of that group answered correctly to all the questions of the test. Instead, only half of the respondents of the control group managed to obtain the same score. These results suggest that listening to music in classroom is positively associated with student attention, memory, and understanding of the topic. During the second phase of the research, 130 students were asked to complete a survey about the impact of music based-learning on different aspects related with student achievement. Descriptive statistics analysis indicated moderate levels of perceived benefits of music-based approach to student learning. Future research is therefore required to establish the efficiency of this method by conducting additional experiments among students and by approaching a higher number of survey participants.