Effect of Background Music on Origami Task Performance Among Pre-school Children

Abstract

New approaches have always been explored by music education researchers in helping students to perform at their optimum level in their learning processes. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of background music on Origami task performance among pre-school children aged five and six years old. Many types of research were done on the topic of background music on spatial task performance, however, little research was done among the group of pre-school children and using Origami as a measurement tool on spatial task performance. Ninety-one participants from two kindergartens in the Klang Valley, Malaysia were selected for the study. The Origami task chosen in this study is sampan (little boat). The selected background music in this study is Mozart’s Sonata, K.448 with the intention of replicating Rauscher and colleagues’ research in Mozart effect. In the experiment, the participants completed the folding of Origami sampan under two environments: (1) with music and (2) without music. The participants of Kindergarten A had undergone the environment with background music first, followed by the environment with background music while participants from Kindergarten B had undergone the environment with background music first, followed by the environment without background music. The purpose of switching the environments in the experiment for both kindergartens is to optimize the result of the data collected through the experiment. The Dependent T-tests were used to generate data and results had shown that the participants achieved higher scores in the Origami task in the environment with background music.