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Audiobooks are becoming increasingly popular, but it is unclear what effect they have on the learning process. It is also unclear whether time of day impacts the learning process. The main question of this experiment was to determine whether there was a difference in concentration levels and memory retention when subjects were given a physical books to read versus an audiobook and whether the time of day impacted this as well.
16 university students between the ages of 19-22 participated in this experiment. Subjects were randomly placed into one of two groups. One group was asked to read a short story while the group was asked to listen to an audiobook version of the story. After reading or listening, subjects were administered a short survey which contained a mixture of content-related questions and questions about how distracted they felt. Subjects were asked to rate their distractibility on a scale of 1-5 (1 = “very distracted, 5 = “not distracted” ). All subjects were asked to complete two trials of the experiment, once in the afternoon and once in the evening. The results of this experiment indicated that subjects, regardless of the type of book they were assigned, on average performed better on the quiz during the evening trial than the afternoon trial. The results also indicated that subjects who listened to the audiobook reported a higher distractibility compared to subjects who read the story, although there was no significant difference in their actual performance on the content related questions. From this experiment, we conclude that there seems to be no difference in the learning process between listening to an audiobook and reading a physical book and that university students perform significantly better on tasks in the evening compared to the afternoon. |
Poster Presented at Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference
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