The effects of inducing mood and arousal through music before learning from an instructional video.

Abstract

Instructional videos have become increasingly popular in elementary education. Educationalists have to make deliberate decisions while developing and selecting instructional videos. Therefore it is desirable to create research-based principles for instructional video designs (De Koning et al., 2018). This experiment therefore examined the effect of listening to music on the level of arousal, mood, and learning in children from the fifth and sixth grade of elementary school. All participants studied an instructional video in which they learned about the moon. Before the video, they listened to music that aimed to elicit a certain mood (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low). The manipulation of arousal was successful, post-music arousal scores significantly differed from pre-music arousal scores. However, this difference did not lead to different retention scores. The mood manipulation was unsuccesfull. Therefore, exploratory analyses were conducted; the effect of mood and arousal on retention was examined independently of the music conditions. Repeated measures ANOVAs found an effect of arousal and mood on retention. A repeated measures ANCOVA with mood as between subject factor and retention as within subject factor, with arousal as covariate, was nonsignificant. The effect of mood on retention only occurred when combined with higher arousal levels.