One of the Center’s goals is to initiate research studies investigating the effects of music making on academic achievement, health and well being. The Center developed the first study listed below. The Center is publicizing the other studies in order to encourage replication.
Affirming Parallel Concepts:
Want to Teach Reading and Math? Try Singing!
Since January 2005, 75 Minneapolis Public Schools classroom teachers (including a few music teachers) have conducted action research studies with their students based on this course taught by Dr. Elizabeth Olson and Ann Kay. They are investigating the effect of singing every day and affirming parallel concepts among reading, math and music on students' reading and math achievement. A number of studies have indicated dramatic improvement in student achievement.
Lincoln kindergarten students achieved the highest scores in the district in letter sound acquisition in winter ’06 and again in winter ’07, and showed the most growth of any school from fall to winter in both years. One of those teachers moved to Shingle Creek in fall ’06. In ’06-‘07 Shingle Creek kindergartners posted the second highest score in letter sound acquisition and second highest growth (as compared to fifth in scores and fourth in growth the previous year). Two Pillsbury kindergarten teachers began A Song a Day in fall ’06. Pillsbury moved from not being in the top 20 schools in ’05-’06 to fourth in letter sound acquisition in winter ‘07 and fifth in growth from fall to winter in ’06-‘07.
A class of Wenonah third graders that received four 15-minute A Song a Day lessons a week scored substantially higher than the other third graders on timed multiplication tests by the end of the year.
Anvari, S.H., Trainor, L.J, Woodside, J, Levy, B.A. (2002). Relations among musical skills, phonological processing, and early reading ability in preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 83 (20), 111-130.
Music skills were found to correlate significantly with both phonological awareness and reading development in 100 4- 5-year-old children. Music perception appears to tap auditory mechanisms related to reading that only partially overlap with those related to phonological awareness, suggesting that both linguistic and nonlinguistic general auditory mechanisms are involved in reading.
Beck, R. J., Cesario, T. C., Yousefi, A., & Enamoto, H. (2000). Choral singing, performance, perception, and immune system changes in salivary Immunoglobulin A and Cortisol. Music Perception, 18 (1), 87-106.
Professional choral singers experienced raised levels of immune system proteins important for fighting off disease-causing agents after performing Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.” Researchers looked at singers’ levels of immune system proteins, including immunoglobulin A (IgA) and the stress hormone cortisol, in saliva before and after two rehearsals and the performance.
Beck, R. J., Bozeman, K. W., Cisler, C. A., Gottfried, T. L., Hall, D. J. (2006). Supporting the health of college solo singers: the relationship of positive emotions and stress to changes in salivary IgA and cortisol during singing, Journal for Learning through the Arts: A Research Journal on Arts Integration in Schools and Communities, 2 (1), 19.
Singers experienced health benefits from singing, but the physical demands of their art form may leave them prone to health problems. Singers’ positive emotions about their singing were associated with increases in S-IgA production, the body’s primary defense against pathogens that invade the respiratory or gastrointestinal tract.
Cheek, J.M. & Smith, L.R. (1999). Music training and mathematics achievement. Adolescence, 34, 759-61.
Eighth grade students who received two or more years of private lessons had a significantly higher mean mathematics score than did students with no private lessons. Students who received lessons on keyboard had significantly higher mathematics scores than did students who had music lessons but not on the keyboard.
Costa-Giomi, E. (1999). The effect of three years of piano instruction on children’s cognitive development. Journal of Research in Music Education, 47 (3), 198-212, EJ 604 142.
9-year-old children who were provided with piano instruction scored higher than controls on a spatial-temporal task immediately following the instruction. However, no differences between the music and control groups were found after two years of instruction. A follow-up study revealed that those who began music instruction before age 5 scored significantly higher on spatial tasks than those who began later or did not receive instruction (Costa-Giomi, 2000).
Fujioka, T., Ross, B., Kakigi, R., Pantev, C. & Trainor, L. (2006). One year of musical training affects development of auditory cortical-evoked fields in young children. Brain, 129 (10), 2593-2608.
A clear musical training effect was expressed in a larger and earlier N250m peak in the left hemisphere in response to the violin sound in musically trained 4-6-year-old children compared with untrained children in the first year of musical training. This transition could be related to establishing a neural network associated with sound categorization and/or involuntary attention, which can be altered by music learning experience. It suggests that this experience affects working memory capacity.
Gromko, J.E., (2005). The effect of music instruction on phonemic awareness in beginning readers. Journal of Research in Music Education, 53 (3), 199-209.
Kindergarten children who received 4 months of music instruction showed significantly greater gains in development of their phoneme segmentation fluency when compared to children who did not receive musical instruction.
Ho, Y., Cheung, M., & Chan, A.S. (2003). Music training improves verbal but not visual memory; Cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations in children. Neuropsychology, 17 (3), 439-450.
Children with music training demonstrated better verbal but not visual memory than did their counterparts without such training. When these children were followed up after a year, those who had begun or continued music training demonstrated significant verbal memory improvement. Students who discontinued the training did not show any improvement.
Olson, E. K. (2003). Affirming parallel concepts among reading, mathematics, and music through kodály music instruction. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Iowa. Dissertation Abstracts International, 64 (12), 4400A.
Results of affirming parallel concepts during music class showed a significant difference between groups for first grade on math achievement. Gender subgroups of first, second and third grade students revealed a significant difference for females at all grade levels in math achievement and first and second grade males in reading achievement.
Rauscher, F.H., & LeMieux, M.T. (2003). Piano, rhythm, and singing instruction improve different aspects of spatial-temporal reasoning in head start children. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York.
123 economically disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old children received musical instruction in three different groups: keyboard, singing, and rhythm. All three music groups scored higher on spatial tasks following music instruction than did a control group, with the rhythm group scoring higher than all other groups on sequencing and arithmetic tasks. Verbal, matching, and memory tasks were not significantly affected, suggesting that different types of music making affect different aspects of cognition.
Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. American Psychological Society, 15 (8), 511-514.
Published Abstract—
The idea that music makes you smarter has received considerable attention from scholars and the media. The present report is the first to test this hypothesis directly with random assignment of a large sample of children (N = 144) to two different types of music lessons (keyboard or voice) or voice or to control groups that received drama lessons or no lessons. Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic achievement. Unexpectedly, children in the drama group exhibited substantial pre- to post-test improvements in adaptive social behavior that were not evident in the music groups.
