Inquiry Ideas

What's the backstory to your inquiry?  What interests you?  Why is it of interest and importance at this point in your teaching life?  What personal connections do you have to the topic?

One of the things I have thought about to pursue for my personal inquiry topic is how students listening to music can affect their work in an academic classroom setting in both positive and negative ways.  I have had a lot of personal experience of students always wanting to listen to their music in class while they work on something.  I know that I enjoy filling the air with sound when I work on things, so I am not adamantly opposed to the idea, however I think that often students blindly choose the wrong type of music to listen to when they are trying to focus and work on something in an academic setting.  This poor choice of music then has diminishing returns on their focus, concentration, and ultimately their work output.


Where does your idea come from?  What questions do you have?  What is your goal?
My idea comes from constantly trying to battle with students over the use of music in the classroom.  I feel like if I give the power to students to choose their own music (especially students in the middle school age range) they will choose the wrong type of accompaniment and then not be able to produce work during class.  However, if I take control and pick the type of music for the classroom, even though I know that type of music has been researched and proved to have positive effects, students will still argue that they dislike classical music, or world music, or electronic music, etc.

I have questions about the results of the studies that have been conducted on this topic before and if there is a difference in how the music is delivered to students.  For example, is the music played over a speaker in the classroom for all to hear, or do all students have their own individual sets of headphones?  Also, I would like to know were these studies measuring student output of certain types of academic work (math/science/technology types of activities compared to pre-writing discovery compared to initial writing compared to draft evaluation, etc)?

I would overall like to feel confident in my decision on whether or not to allow music in the classroom based on an analysis of research.  That way I feel I can make an informed decision.