Music has been found to be a positive tool in a physical activity setting. One context music can be beneficial in, is in a physical education setting. Barney and Prusak (in press) found that elementary aged students took more steps when music was playing during walking and frisbee activities. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of music on physical activity rates, via pedometers, of college-aged students in basketball classes.
Method:
For this study 106 (males=102 & females=4) college-aged students participated in this study. University IRB approval was granted. The participants were enrolled in four intermediate basketball classes. Convenience sampling of four college activity basketball classes was employed in a quasi-experimental design. Two classes (one class from each instructor) played basketball with music playing and the other two classes (one from each instructor) played basketball with not music. The music selected for this study consisted of popular, upbeat fast tempo (120 to 160 BPM) songs suggested by one of the researchers. On the days data was collected, students would put on a pedometer and shoot around (warm-up) for 10 minutes. After the 10-minute warm-up, students would reset their pedometer to zero and play a 30-minute game of full-court basketball. At the end of the 30-minute game the students would write down the number of steps they took and the time they were in activity on a student record sheet. Two class periods were used to collect data.
Analysis/Results:
A significant difference in both steps taken and time in activity was found between the classes that played music during game play and the classes that did not play music during game play (F(1,94) = 22.132, p < .001), (F(1, 94) = 23.007, p < .001) respectively. This analysis revealed that the students in the basketball classes with music playing took more steps (M = 3788, SD = 424.07) than the students with no music playing during game play (M = 3418, SD = 344.00). The same applied to time in activity, music played (M= 30, SD = 3.77), no music played (M = 27, SD= 2.41).
Conclusions:
The findings from this study bare the fact that those students during game play with music playing had significantly more steps and more time in activity, then those student that played during game play with no music.