Exploring the Effect of Personalized Background Music on Reading Comprehension

Abstract

It is a common phenomenon that many students study with background music, but the influence of background music on learning is still an open question, with inconclusive findings in the literature. Inspired by the research gap, we conducted a controlled user experiment on reading with 100 students from a comprehensive university. The participants were tasked to read nine academic passages. In the meantime, those who were randomly allocated to the experiment group listened to their self-provided music in the background during the reading task, while those in the control group did not have background music during reading. During the experiment, participants' reading logs, self-reported meta-cognition and emotion status were recorded. This paper reports the results of comparing measures on reading performance, meta-cognition and emotion changes between the two groups. In addition, the relationships between participants' personal traits and their preferred background music types were investigated. Findings indicated that learning with background music of one's own choice could be beneficial for maintaining positive emotion, with no cost on reading performance. Through providing empirical evidence on the effect of background music on reading, this study contributes to furthering our understanding on human behaviors in multi-channel learning settings and rendering design implications for personalized recommendations in online music services and music digital libraries for facilitating reading and self-learning.