Can songs help students learn?

Learning through a song may help students to better grasp the big picture

Can the use of songs in school foster students’ learning? In 2018, Ulm University researchers Janina Lehman n and Tina Seyfert published a study in Frontiers in Psychology that suggests that music may indeed have a place in the classroom.
       Lehman n first became interested in the question of music and learning when she attended a ‘90s-themed party. She noticed that everyone knew all the words to the Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys songs they hadn’t heard in years. “I started wondering why it seems to be so easy to recall lyrics and thought that I would like to investigate this phenomenon.“
There aren’t many detailed studies about using songs as a learning tool. Even though some teachers use music as part of their curriculum, the benefits they see are often anecdotal. Mary McLellan is one of these teachers. She teaches an advanced statistics course at a high school in Texas, and has created a collection of several dozen very short songs about statistics concepts that she uses repeatedly during lessons. Her students report that the songs help reinforce what they learned in class, and that they still remember them months later.

But, it’s difficult to separate the direct effect of a song from the rest of a student’s classroom experience. How can we tell whether it’s really the music that fosters learning? To answer this question, Lehmann visited a German high school, where she divided the students (aged 12-19) into three groups. The first group was taught a history lesson about King Henry VIII by listening to a recording of a song. The second group listened to the same lyrics, but spoken instead of sung. The third group read the same text without audio support.
All students were then given the same test to determine how well they remembered and understood what they had learned. Lehmann found that students who had read the written text were better at remembering the information, but students who had listened to the song demonstrated a better comprehension of the material.
        This difference is likely related to the different ways in which auditory and visual information are processed. Reading uses an additional processing step compared to listening. When we read a text, the information is processed in both visual and auditory channels, but when we listen to spoken or sung text, this bypasses the visual channel entirely. This makes processing of auditory information faster and comprehension easier – as long as there isn’t too much information.
When it comes to auditory information processing, Lehmann’s experiment showed a slight benefit of listening to a song compared to hearing the same text spoken. This effect could be due to the novelty factor of learning through music, or because the students enjoyed the melody. The act of learning through a song, for the first time, may have been enough motivation for students to focus more. On the other hand, the benefit of reading is that students can learn at their own pace and devote more attention to certain sections. So, while the students in this study were better able to grasp the big picture when they heard the text, they could better recall small details when they read it.
     In a real-world classroom setting, reading and listening aren’t entirely separate. When teachers use a song in a lesson, it includes information that overlaps with what’s in the textbook. Sometimes students hear the song, and sometimes they read the text. Lehmann advises to not do both simultaneously, though: “Reading a text and listening to it (in a sung version) at the same time leads to problems integrating them and thereby to cognitive load.” She adds, “such redundancies should be avoided in learning scenarios.”

                       Robots: Learning companions for our children

             When you were a child, did you ever dream of having an imaginary buddy to help you with your schoolwork? What has long been the stuff of science fiction may soon become a reality. With the progress that has been made in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the idea that every child could have a personal robot tutor is no longer so outlandish, and some schools and countries have already introduced robots into the classroom. What role can AI play in education, and what promises and challenges does it entail? In 1997, when the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a dramatic six-game match, the world suddenly took notice of the existence of artificial intelligence and its potential. Since then, AI has made several spectacular technological leaps. Today’s machines are not only capable of performing billions of operations per second, they are also able to learn. In 2017, it took the computer program Alpha Zero just a few hours of playing thousands of games against itself to reach a level of proficiency no human chess player can match. With the advances they have made over the past 20 years, artificial intelligence and machine learning have begun to permeate nearly every aspect of our everyday lives – and education is no exception. Research in the fields of educational robotics and computerizing is now focusing on building machines that can effectively support learning and teaching – and a great deal has already been accomplished. One of the goals is to create robot tutors that can adapt to each child’s needs. This idea holds great promise. Robot tutors that are capable of learning would allow teaching to become much more personalized, since they can adapt as the child progresses. If pupils struggle with an exercise, the robot can provide extra practice; once they have mastered the material, the robot can move on to more difficult subject matter, in keeping with the principle of scaffold-ed learning. The robot can also adapt its strategies to the needs of children with learning difficulties.


My reflection:
Robot is important to our lives.
They may help us in different ways such as helping in dangerous operations like in police operations were they are the one who is responsible to distinguished a bomb when there are some treats, being a friend at all time to give comfort to us..

The Secret Heart

Across the years he could recall

His father one way best of all

In the stillest hour of night

The boy awakened to a light

Half in dreams, he was his sire

With his great hands full of fire.

The man had struck a match to see

If his son slept peacefully

He held his palm each side the park

His loved had kindle in the dark

His two hands were curved apart

In the semblance of a heart

He wore it seemed to his small son,

A bare heart on his hidden one

A heart that gave out such a glow

No son awake could bare to know

It showed a look upon a face

Too tender for the day to trace

One instant, it lit all about

But shone long enough for one

To know that hands held up the sun

''Education is what remains

after one has forgotten

what one has learned in school.

Develop a passion for learning.

If you do, you will never cease to grow.''