Reading: Differences in cortical activity related to motor planning between experienced guitarists and non-musicians during guitar playing

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Human Movement Science, Volume 31, Issue 3, June 2012, Pages 567–577
Authors: David J. Wright, Paul S. Holmes, Francesco Di Russo, Michela Loporto, Dave Smith

Main point:

Experiment (n=10+10) with experienced guitarists and non-musicians (received only 15 min instruction on how to play a G-major scale on the guitar) showed no differences in early motor planning, but negative slope and motor potential components had smaller amplitude in the case of experienced players and negative slope began later.

Authors say: “The data may indicate that, for experienced guitarists, a reduced level of effort is required during the motor preparation phase of the task”

My thoughts: the “experienced” players should be professionals (starting from 10 000 h of practice during lifetime) to have bigger contrasts. To gain more statistical power the sample should be bigger. M/F should be equal in groups, or, if there is evidence that it doesn’t matter, I’d like to see it mentioned.

For the first time I saw the term “ecologically valid motor skill”. Wikipedia helps out: “In research, the ecological validity of a study means that the methods, materials and setting of the study must approximate the real-world that is being examined. Unlike internal and external validity, ecological validity is not necessary to the overall validity of a study.”

 

Reading: A Coherence Effect in Multimedia Learning: The Case for Minimizing Irrelevant Sounds in the Design of Multimedia Instructional Messages

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Journal of Educational Psychology 2000, Vol. 92, No. 1, 117-125
Authors: Roxana Moreno, Richard E. Mayer

Main point:

2 experiments (n=75, collage students) showed that groups learning with background music performed worse than with no music. Adding “bells and whistles” to a multimedia study material does not improve learning.

 

Lecture: Beethoven, Bach, and Billions of Bytes

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New Alliances between Music and Computer Science. Meinard Müller (International Audio Laboratories Erlangen). University of Tartu 12th of Apr 2013

In a two-hour long lecture Mr. Müller ran through most of the problems that someone who wants to detect music from an audio source, has to deal with. He will now continue with a full course here at Tartu but unfortunately I cannot participate. But my colleague will, so hopefully we get some useful information for our project.

As I knew before – most of the difficulties lie in timing. A human adapts to the current situation and finding a robust approach for a machine is not always possible.

 

Reading: Music is as distracting as noise: the differential distraction of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts

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Ergonomics, 45:3, 203-217, 2002
Authors: Adrian Furham, Lisa Stbac

Main point:

An experiment with 33 male, 43 female, mean age about 17 y. Three conditions: silence, background music and background noise. Music and noise both diminish the study results. Introverts suffer a bit more. Music and noise were not significantly different from on another.

Read: Weinstein 1978 Individual differences in reaction to noise: a longitudinal study in a college dormitory

 

Reading: Reading while watching video: the effect of video content on reading comprehension and media multitasking ability

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Educational Computing Research, Vol. 45 (2) 183-201, 2011
Authors: Lin Lin, Jennifer Lee, Tip Robertson

Main point:

Experiment (n=130, 90% female 23.9 y/o). Two multitasking environments: background video+reading and video+reading (testing both video and reading content afterwards). Background condition resulted better reading scores, test condition better video scores. Different video contents – comedy (positive) and news (negative) had different effects on reading.

Participants achieved better overall results in the background video condition. That is – when one tries to share attention between two sources of information then he actually can store less.

Read: Lin, Robertson, Lee (2009) Reading performances between novices and experts in different media multitasking environments

 

Reading: The Effect of Background Music and Noise on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts

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Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25: 307-313 (2011)
Authors: Stacey Dobbs, Adrian Furnham, Alastair McClelland

Main point:

Experiments with female secondary school students (n=118) showed that with one exception, all tasks were performed better if the background was silent. Noise is worse than music. Introverts are more affected by the irrelevant sounds.

My thoughts:

A strong study in a compact form. Some concerns: Many studies like that are conducted in a laboratory setting: i.e. the noise and background music is the same for everybody and comes from a CD-player. This is an unrealistic situation.  Also, since some may not like the music, the conditions are actually uneven.

Read: Furnham, Gunter, Peterson. Television distraction and the performance of introverts and extroverts.

Reading: VirSchool, the effect of background music and immersive display systems on memory for facts learned in an educational virtual environment

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Computers & Education 58 (2012) 490-500
Authors: Eric Fassbender, Deborah Richards, Ayse Bilgin, William Forde Thomson, Wolfgang Heiden

Main point:

A virtual history lesson with or without instrumental background music was presented to the participants. Two differnet display systems: Reality Center, 3-monitor system. n=48 (mean age 22.7). 3-monitor group remembered more facts than Reality Center group (both ‘music’ and ‘no music’ conditions). Reality Center group remembered more facts when background music was played.

In my opinion the groups were too small to use so many conditions. Let’s take one thing at the time or increase the samples.

Evaluating Recorded Sounds

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As I am currently measuring the study environment’s possible effects to the study results, I have to find a way to evaluate the latter. The outcome of my online course’s 1st level weresupposed to be four recorded exercises:

  • Ex. on open strings (video example only)
  • Scale from G to G on solo strings (graphic, notation, video)
  • A folktune from standard notation (notation, audio)
  • A simple melody by ear (audio example only)

I plan to give 1 to 5 marks to every exercise. The first question I have right now is: should I really take all four into account or would the scale be enough? I guess if I take all four, it cannot make anything worse but it is just much more work. Also, since the exercises were presented in different ways, I could get some interesting connections between some environmental elements and certain exercises.

The second question is about evaluating: which characteristics should I evaluate? In this stage, every student is struggling to play the correct notes with the given rhythm so there is really no point to evaluate any musical aspects. So these characteristics would be:

  • Correct notes
  • Correct rhythms
  • Stable tempo
  • Evenness of tone (volume, sound)?

And the scale would be a 5 step Likert.

Sent Out My First Questionnaire

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Last week I was preparing my questionnaire about study environment. What I want to know is whether the environment where people use the online course has an effect to study results or not.

The questionnaire is made up of three parts: 1) Describing the environment 2) How did it feel 3) Some facts and personal data

I sent out 233 invitations and got about 60 answers in first 20 hours. I had to send it out on Friday morning although I know that Thursday would have been better. Eventually I hope to get 100 answers.

I had prepared the questions in GetResponse, Google Drive and also the Estonian service called eFormular. Before I had used only GR but this time I found that Google was so much better: speed, designing options, real time evaluation plus data writes itself directly to a worksheet.

One week before sending it out I piloted it on 10 persons. Got some feedback, changed couple of questions. Also I measured how much time does the answering take. I think the average is below 10 min. Not much.

Now I will have to wait a bit and then prepare another questionnaire to those people from the database who did not use my feedback during the online course.

Reading: Liu, Lin, Paas, F., Split-attention and Redundancy Effects on Mobile Learning in Physical Environments

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Computers & Education 58 (2012) 172-180

Main point:

Experiment (n=81 with 3 conditions: text+pictures, text+real objects, text+pictures+real objects) showed no difference between text+pic and text+real objects (split attention was expected). But the last condition showed redundancy-effect.

Why couldn’t they detect the split-attention effect?

Although the physical distance between real objects and text in mobile device was much bigger than with text+pic both in mobile, the results did not differ significantly. Authors bring out a possible reason:

  • Magnitude of the real objects’ positive effects exceeded the magnitude of split-attention’s negative effect. Also, studying with real objects could have increased their motivation and made the students more involved.

I thought two things here: 1) we don’t know if the split-attention effect was there or not. We can simply say that study result didn’t differ much.

2) Again I understand that the attitude towards learning may have important effects and would even outperform the problems arising from lousy study materials.

And to continue from here: can the study materials define the way of learning? (remember the active, constructive, interactive from Chi)