An educational psychologist investigated whether listening to instrumental music while studying affects memory recall. She recruited a sample of 40 students who volunteered from a local college.
Condition 1: Students memorised a list of 30 words while listening to background instrumental music.
Condition 2: The same students memorised a different list of 30 words of equal difficulty in silence.
The median number of correctly recalled words and incorrectly recalled/omitted words for each condition was calculated. The results are shown in Table 1.
Table 1 The median number of correctly recalled and incorrectly recalled/omitted words under two environmental conditions
| Music Condition | Silence Condition | |
|---|---|---|
| Median number of words correctly recalled | 14 | 21 |
| Median number of words incorrectly recalled/omitted | 16 | 9 |
The psychologist was concerned that the recall scores would be affected by the participants taking part in both conditions of the experiment.
Explain one way the psychologist could deal with this problem.
Practise AQA A Level Psychology Scientific processes with exam-style questions for A Level Psychology. 689 questions, matched to the AQA A Level Psychology (7182) specification and written in Paper 1, Paper 2 and Paper 3 style. Every question includes a full worked solution and mark scheme, so you can see where marks are awarded rather than just whether you got the answer right.
