SUPERLEARNING AT THE UNIVERSITY. THE USE OF MUSIC AND GROUP DYNAMICS ON TEACHING OF THE SUBJECT OF STATISTICS INFERENCE IN ECONOMICS DEGREE

Kathryn Schulz, author of Being wrong: Adventures in the margin of error (2011), in her TED talk about “being wrong”, in the same year, defines the general behaviour of humans as pretending that everyone watch the same when looking through a window. This premise, that could seem absurd and non-sense, would serve as a perfect description of how the educational system is conceived in general.

The traditional techniques of “one speaker-many listeners”, especially at university level, may discourage the students and put limits to their creativity. In order to overcome those barriers, the concept of superlearning, aims to unleash the potential of the students and teachers. Following those premises, we have experimented, firstly with the use of tested music during the academic lectures in order to improve the environment of the classroom, the attitude of the students towards the lesson and bigger motivation towards the autonomous learning. The music introduced a significant change in the traditional way of teaching that was also intended to enhance to interest of students towards the studies.

The framework of this study were the lessons taking place at the University of La Laguna (ULL) in Canary Islands (Spain), during the lectures of the subject of Statistical Inference in Economics degree. The students (62) coursed this subject in the first semester of the second year of studies and the experiment was realised in the morning and the afternoon lectures (attending by different students) and as well on the exam. The same teacher, one of the authors of this paper, conducted all of them.

Through the whole semester two different kinds of music were played; the first one, used in 10 of the 15 weeks of lecture, meaning 30 session amounting 35 hours in total, was labelled like Baroque music, consisted on the combination of a series of pieces of classical music that composed several long play lists to coincide with the duration of each type of lecture: 55 or 70 minutes. The classical music pieces were selected by the authors of this study based on the research of Instituto Superior de Ciencias Terapeúticas y Educativas (ISCTE).

The music was not the only factor introduced and a series of group dynamics during the development of the subject were carried out as a necessary complement for this new teaching approach. Some of those dynamics have been created “ex professo” by the teacher herself, while others have been taking from the field of the non formal education and have been successfully proved in diverse youth exchanges along the years and are backed up by official institutions such as the DG Education and Culture of the European Union through the SALTO network and also by large students’ association such as AEGEE and Erasmus Students Network (ESN).

The combination of both factors has been a vehicle for achieving a better environment and bigger concentration and self-esteem favouring a more integrative learning.

The academic results have been so positive –with a huge increasing of students successfully passing the subject comparing to pass years and a very positive feed back from the surveys conducted to measure the effects of the new methodology- that we firmly believe that they should be not only analysed but also motivate a bigger applied research in this direction. In this way, there is an on going research at the same university and subject that we expect will produce the results that confirm the currently obtained ones.