Hello again, my beloved followers! It has been a while since we (I) last spoke (earlier today)!

After posting (and editing several times) by first ever blog post, I came across an unconventional but interesting study. Read all the goodness here:
Teaching Accounting: Setting the Right Tone with a Tune

This article’s title immediately caught my attention, as both a music and accounting-teaching buff. After shaking off my initial visions of head-banging to classic rock music with my students à la Dewey Finn (Jack Black- may he rock forever) in School of Rock, I dove into the article itself. The two authors, Matthew A. Phillips and Jacob T. Crowley, do a great job of adding a quick personal touch before getting into the scientific mumbo jumbo. The fact that a qualified industry professional has already successfully accomplished the great feat of not having his audience fall asleep during an accounting presentation added immediate credibility to everything I was going to read. Throw in a bit of rock-and-roll and I was totally hooked to this article!

The second element (it’s Helium btw- no need to go look for that periodic table from your high school Chem class) which I really liked about this article is that they addressed the usual accounting stereotypes such as it being a boring, difficult, and tedious subject. As someone who frequently experiences sleepy and disinterested students, it’s always somewhat gratifying to have someone else blame the subject and, by extension, not me- the instructor. The hypothesis that music could help “soothe” the learning anxiety experienced by students certainly made sense to me, since I spent the majority of my High School and University life plugged into noise-cancelling headphones and avoiding social interaction- music was always my great excuse to avoid people and, consequently, anxiety.

Finally, I reached the “meat and potatoes” portion of this study where the regular students were compared to the rocking ones. There were several learning benefits to including tunes in the lecture, in addition to anxiety-reduction. One example discussed in the study was playing the song Photograph to help hammer home the idea that a Balance Sheet is a “snapshot” of a company at a specific point in time. In my personal case, this likely would have pushed my existing  knowledge of balance sheets right out of my noggin (Nickelback, ugh). Music also axed the negative stereotypes about accounting and fired up the students’ creative juices to the point where they actively questioned how a particular song was related to a concept- as we were taught early on, no question is a bad one in the classroom.

Overall, I give this study a solid 9/10- great work Mr. Phillips and Mr. Crowley! Sorry- I had to take away a point for using Nickelback when you could have easily gone with Def Leppard.