Ashley, Sarah, Casey

Does music affect your productivity?

Introduction: Our group was inspired to test whether or not listening to music affects the
productivity in students because in our school we have found that some teachers allow students
to listen to music while other teachers dont. If we could prove whether or not music helps the
productivity of students then the option would be less debated. As students we realized that many
of our peers agree that music helps them learn and work, but could be considered distracting and
make their performance in school worse, so why not design an experiment that can decide
whether or not this is true? In order to design our experiment we had to decide which types of
music we should test and how we could test the productivity of students. We decided that we
would perform 3 different tests, one without music, one while students listen to upbeat/ high
tempo music, and another test while students listen to calming/ low tempo music. This would
help us understand that if music affects your productivity, which kind of music? We also decided
that in order to test the students we would need to design an experiment that could be repeated 3
times and could easily show either improvement or decrease in productivity on students. So as a
group we determined that we would time the students while they created origami tulips and
measure the amount of tulips they made each day while they either listen to music or dont.
Question and Hypothesis:
Does music affect the productivity of students?
If music affects the productivity of students then upbeat/ high tempo music will make an
increase in productivity because the music will inspire and make students motivated to perform
the task they are given.
Methods and Materials:
1. We first created 2 different playlists, one playlist with upbeat/ high tempo music
and one with low tempo/ calming music.
2. Then we cut lots of paper into squares that could be easily used for origami.
3. We searched and origami project that was easy enough so it could be memorized
easily and wouldnt take much time to create.
4. We collected the materials we would need in order to test the students, the square
paper, markers, and a stapler.
5. Then we started our experiment, we first explained and taught the students how to
create the origami tulips.
6. Then we set our timer for 20 minutes and timed the students while they made
flowers without listening to music.
7. Once the 20 minutes were over we created a data table and inserted the amount of
flowers they made within the 20 minutes of them not listening to music.
8. The next 2 days we repeated the steps but testing them with upbeat/ high tempo
music and the next day testing them with low temp/ calming music.

Results: After performing our experiment we have found that in all of the students we tested
their productivity rate increased while they listened to music opposed to when they didn't listen
to music. All the students also were most productive when listening to upbeat/ high tempo music
rather than low tempo/ calming music. This data concludes and proves that our hypothesis was
correct.