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Music lessons
Can jingles point the way to helping learners retain vital information?

By Lisa Neal / November 2007

TYPE: OPINION
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I like to peruse the daily newspaper, including the obituaries, because one never knows what one might find. I just read the obituary of Thomas Dawes, a not especially well-known musician whose obituary was featured because he wrote "some of advertising's best known jingles, including 'Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz' for Alka-Seltzer." Now I don't even know anyone who takes Alka-Seltzer but I can sing this jingle without a moment's hesitation, along with the hosiery jingle "Our L'eggs Fit Your Legs" and other Dawes' creations. Memorizing these jingles was effortless, even unintentional. Teachers, in contrast, struggle on a daily basis to engage their students and get what they are teaching to stick.

In an in eLearn Magazine interview, design guru Don Norman talked about the impact of music in movies. "Movies go to great efforts to recreate realism on screen and get you involved, yet feel it essential that they have music in the background. They feel it really adds to the interpretation and experience. It's often the case that artists are ahead of scientists. What scientists do is notice what the artists have done, and then try to understand it." Let's call Thomas Dawes an artist and examine what he created.

Dawes' tunes and lyrics were short, catchy, and repetitive. These qualities surely increase their memorability—often embarrassingly so—many years later. Most people do not teach this way. In fact, I have often said to my students, "Remember this, it's very important." I now wonder what would happen if I sang these important concepts to my students, like we were in a musical. Different parts of memory are used for sound, smell, taste, etc., but does music make words more memorable? Or can it mask their meaning? Even though I can sing Dawes' lyrics, I didn't act upon them, though I assume others did.

Music has been shown to promote memory better than either silence or background noise. A 2001 study by M. Larkin called "Music Tunes Up Memory in Dementia Patients" selected 23 subjects with dementia and tested their recall after they were exposed to four different types of noise: no noise, cafeteria noise, familiar music, and novel music. The study found that recall was better with sound than with silence and better with music than with cafeteria noise. Has this been confirmed by iPod listeners too?

Educational television certainly learned this lesson, as evidenced by "Sesame Street" and other children's shows. And then there's "The hip bone's connected to the thigh bone…," which may not be on the tip of most medical students' tongues but certainly offers a memorable introduction to anatomy. However, there are few music-inspired techniques or older children or for adult learners-but perhaps there should be?

In the movie, Akeelah and the Bee, Akeelah's spelling coach has her practice spelling while jumping rope as a memory aid, which serves her well when she gets stuck at the spelling bee. Now I wonder if I should sing or tap dance for my students to enhance their recall.



Comments

  • Sat, 07 Nov 2015
    Post by TA-DA...Teaching Activities Done Aesthetically

    You are so right when you said, "Maybe there should be music inspired techniques to inspire older children!" I teach elementary students and know the power of using music to learn. My students learn expanding numbers through songs, as well as adding fractions. They learn about fossils, when the volcano Mt. Vesuvius, and when it blew in 79 A.D. We sing about bones,and how ligaments are the strong stretchy bands that hold our bones together and that these are joints. Songs like the engineering design process helps us to solve problems of the world. Yes, music: teaches my students facts, serves as a reading resource, allows them to use the song to know write a narrative or information text, and to learn history, geography, biographies, and science as they get excited about the wonderful world that they can contribute to with their knowledge that becomes power! STEAM is a powerful part of our learning...and using music as part of the "A" for arts brings enjoyment and excitement to our classroom.

ADDITIONAL READING

    Lisa Neal
  1. "Spot Learning"
  2. Q&A with Saul Carliner
  3. When will e-learning reach a tipping point?
  4. Online learning and fun
  5. In search of simplicity
  6. eLearning and fun
  7. Everything in moderation
  8. The basics of e-learning
  9. Is it live or is it Memorex?
  10. The Value of Voice
  11. Predictions for 2006
  12. Five Questions...for Christopher Dede
  13. Five Questions... for John Seely Brown
  14. Five questions...for Shigeru Miyagawi
  15. "Deep" thoughts
  16. 5 questions... for Richard E. Mayer
  17. Designing usable, self-paced e-learning courses
  18. Want better courses?
  19. Just "DO IT"
  20. Five questions...
  21. Formative evaluation
  22. Senior service
  23. Blogging to learn and learning to blog
  24. My life as a Wikipedian
  25. Five questions...for Elliott Masie
  26. The stripper and the bogus online degree
  27. Five questions...for Lynn Johnston
  28. Five questions...for Tom Carey
  29. Not all the world's a stage
  30. Five questions...for Karl M. Kapp
  31. Five questions...for Larry Prusack
  32. Five questions...for Seb Schmoller
  33. Do distance and location matter in e-learning?
  34. Why do our K-12 schools remain technology-free?
  35. Learn to apologize for fun and profit
  36. Of web hits and Britney Spears
  37. Advertising or education?
  38. Five questions…for Matt DuPlessie
  39. Back to the future
  40. Serious games for serious topics
  41. Five (or six) questions...for Irene McAra-McWilliam
  42. Learner on the Orient Express
  43. Talk to me
  44. Degrees by mail
  45. Predictions for 2004
  46. Q&A with Diana Laurillard
  47. Do it yourself
  48. How to get students to show up and learn
  49. Q&A
  50. Blended conferences
  51. Predictions for 2002
  52. Learning from e-learning
  53. Storytelling at a distance
  54. Q&A with Don Norman
  55. Predictions For 2003