In 1982, D. Zillmann, J.J. Wakshlag and R.J. Reitz published a study in the "Journal of Educational Psychology" relating children's learning to music. It focused on the background music's affect in children's educational TV programs and it showed that there's a positive relationship between fast-paced, appealing music and the average viewer's attention span. The assumption was that longer viewing periods meant more information was acquired. Aside from being an effective tool for catching and maintaining students' attention, music also serves as an effective reinforcer, or mnemonic device, enhancing one's reception of new information as well as his ability to retain it.
A study conducted by Anne Savan, a science teacher in the Aberdare Boys School in the United Kingdom, suggests that a few select Mozart compositions are especially effective in improving behavior and physical coordination in students with aggressive and disruptive tendencies. This twofold effect apparently enhances learning capacity by increasing cooperativeness and by removing one major source of frustration in very young students: problems with coordination. The subsequent increase in confidence also has a positive effect on students' on-task performance, particularly among males.
The consensus among researchers is that background music has no statistically significant effect on a student's mathematical skills. Exposure to different conditions - no sound, white noise background, or background music - makes no remarkable difference in students' arithmetic scores. One 1983 study conducted by Mike Manthei and Steve N. Kelly of the University of Nebraska at Omaha tested the effect of four levels of background music loudness in math test scores, but even that showed no dramatic difference, in spite of subjects citing interference with their concentration during testing. On the other hand, students who habitually listen to hard rock music when studying reportedly improve in this area when allowed to study in a quiet environment.
As with mathematical skills, vocabulary and reading comprehension neither benefit nor suffer from the presence of background music; however, this is one area where the students' familiarity with the music comes into play. Researchers found that popular music had no effect on vocabulary skills but hampered reading comprehension substantially, presumably because the music drew away the subjects' attention from the paragraphs they were given. So while appealing music can improve attention in certain situations, this is by no means a general rule.