Children Do Much Better in Math When Music is Added to the Lesson: New Study

Photos by Crissy Jarvis (left) and Ben Mullins

A new study explored the causal role that music engagement has on student achievement in mathematics—and they found a significant benefit. Researchers believe that music can make math more enjoyable, keep students engaged, and help ease their fear or anxiety about topics like fractions. The addition of music may even motivate kids to appreciate math and want to learn more. A typical technique for integrating music into math lessons for young children involves clapping to songs with different rhythms learning numbers, and equating fractions to musical notes. The new meta-analysis published in the journal Educational Studies analyzed 55 studies from around the world, involving almost 78,000 students, from kindergarten to university age. Three types of musical interventions were included: typical music lessons in which children sing, listen to, and learn about composing music; learning how to play instruments alone or as part of a band; and music-math integrated interventions, where music was integrated into math lessons. Students took math tests before and after taking part in the intervention, and the change in their scores was compared with those who didn’t take part in any intervention. The use of music—whether in separate lessons or as part of math classes—caused a greater improvement in math over time. Combining both in the same lessons had the most significant effect, with around 73 percent of students who had integrated lessons doing significantly better than children who didn’t have any type of musical intervention. Also, 69 percent of students who learned how to play instruments and 58 percent of students who had normal music lessons improved more than pupils with no musical intervention. The results also revealed that music helps more with learning arithmetic than other types of math and has a bigger impact on younger pupils and those learning basic mathematical concepts. Math and music have much in common, such as the use of symbols and symmetry. Both subjects also require abstract thought and quantitative reasoning. Arithmetic may lend itself particularly well to being taught through music because core concepts, such as fractions and ratios, are also fundamental to music. Musical notes of different lengths can be represented as fractions and added together to create several bars of music. Integrated lessons may be especially effective because they allow pupils to build connections between the math and music and provide extra opportunities to explore, interpret and understand math. “Encouraging mathematics and music teachers to plan lessons together could help ease students’ anxiety about mathematics, while also boosting achievement,” said Dr. Ayça Akın, from the department of software engineering at Antalya Belek University, Turkey. However, she said there were limitations to the study. The relatively small number of studies done meant it wasn’t possible to look at the effect of variables such as gender, socio-economic status, and duration of musical instruction upon the results. Children Do Much Better in Math When Music is Added to the Lesson: New Study

Read More........→April 16, 2024

“Mozart effect”, or can music make you smarter?

Much has been written on the “Mozart effect” - the theory that classical music can stimulate the listener's brain and make them cleverer. Further studies however have refuted the finding and have allegedly proved that the only real benefit to be gained from listening to music is pleasure. It now seems that this enjoyment could be of particular importance where health is concerned.
The “Mozart effect” has long been used as a marketing ploy to sell educational toys or child development materials such as CDs and DVDs. The basic idea was that children who listened to Mozart's music received a "brain boost" to improve their IQ. However, this theory is little more than a medical fairytale. According to Dr. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive scientist at Western University in London, Ontario: “The Mozart effect is a media-driven myth. One study in 1992 showed that undergraduate students who listened to Mozart before a test did better than students who sat in silence or listened to a relaxation tape.” Despite its appeal, the effect has never been confirmed by further studies. As Jessica Grahn said in an interview with the ‘Voice of Russia’: “Later studies showed that this improvement probably had nothing to do with Mozart at all, but instead happens anytime we do something that boosts mood and arousal.” In fact a beneficial effect might indeed be obtained from listening to Mozart; but other kinds of music have been shown to work just as well. What matters is the listener's taste. Dr. Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist from the University of Toronto, said in an interview with the ‘Voice of Russia’ that: “It doesn’t matter if it's Mozart or Schubert. It is just that music makes you feel good. You can get lots of different effects like that with different kinds of stimulus, which make the listeners feel better.” A study on young children has shown, for example, the "Blur effect" similar to what Mozart was thought to achieve. The effect of music is not related to a specific musical genre. Dr. Glenn continued: “We’ve observed that with 9-11 year old children, pop music works better and on 5 year old kids, children's music works better. It actually depends on the listeners; on which music is going to make somebody feel good. The effects can be noticed with every kind of music, but not if the listener hates it!” Enjoyment is the key; examining the brains of people who were listening to music, scientists have discovered that, while the main effect is pleasure, movement is also involved. Dr. Grahn underlined that: “Several studies have shown that 'reward' areas of the brain, areas that respond to pleasurable things like food or sex, also respond when listening to pleasurable music, particularly if it is music that can give you chills”. Music makes you feel good, but it also makes you move, as Grahn added: “I have also found that when people listen to music, areas of the brain that are responsible for controlling movement are active. This suggests music engages our movement systems, even if we're staying perfectly still.”  Even so, music impacts ordinary listeners and musicians differently. As Jessica Grahn observed: “Many responses are similar across listeners and players. However, players sometimes show more responses in movement areas, perhaps because they are imagining playing along.” Moreover, several studies have proved that playing music regularly can improve IQ by a few points. Although listening to music doesn’t actually boost intelligence, it does make you feel good and in that way influences every aspect of life. Dr. Glenn Schellenberg observed that the effect of music on feelings should not be underestimated: “If you talk about a ‘mood effect’, you’re discounting the power that music has on well-being and health in general.” Music can have a crucial impact on health. “If people undergo an operation, if they’re listening to their favourite CD, then they need less medication. There are lots of examples of effects of music on health, and on well-being more generally. Music makes people feel good and how you feel really has a huge impact on every aspect of life,” Schellenberg stressed. The use of music as a complementary therapy is developing. Music is being utilised in hospitals and clinics around the world. More and more charities organise concerts in hospitals. Members of the British NGO“Music in Hospitals” play for patients all over the UK. Music can often minimise pain and increase a patient's well-being. For example, when people undergo surgery, the use of music as a part of their treatment eases anaesthesia, and helps to speed up the healing process.  Although music has no real impact on intelligence, it does seem to have an important role to play as a therapeutic tool which will probably boost your health, but probably not your IQ! Eva Bertrand. Source: Article

Read More........→December 23, 2013

Birdsong study pecks theory that music is uniquely human

Sometimes he sounds like music to her ears. Other times, not so much. 

By Carol Clark, A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience. “We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like,” says Sarah Earp, who led the research as an undergraduate at Emory University. For male birds listening to another male’s song, it was a different story: They had an amygdala response that looks similar to that of people when they hear discordant, unpleasant music. The study, co-authored by Emory neuroscientist Donna Maney, is the first to compare neural responses of listeners in the long-standing debate over whether birdsong is music. “Scientists since the time of Darwin have wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes, or have the same evolutionary precursors,” Earp notes. “But most attempts to compare the two have focused on the qualities of the sound themselves, such as melody and rhythm.” Earp’s curiosity was sparked while an honors student at Emory, majoring in both neuroscience and music. She took “The Musical Brain” course developed by Paul Lennard, director of Emory’s Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program, which brought in guest lecturers from the fields of neuroscience and music. “During one class, the guest speaker was a composer and he said that he thought that birdsong is like music, but Dr. Lennard thought it was not,” Earp recalls. “It turned into this huge debate, and each of them seemed to define music differently. I thought it was interesting that you could take one question and have two conflicting answers that are both right, in a way, depending on your perspective and how you approach the question.” Perhaps your brain would enjoy some music while reading this. Here's a sample of Earp's favorite: "Firebird." As a senior last year, Earp received a grant from the Scholars Program for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research (SPINR), and a position in the lab of Maney, who uses songbirds as a model to study the neural basis of complex learned behavior. When Earp proposed using the lab’s data to investigate the birdsong-music debate, Maney thought it was a great idea. “Birdsong is a signal,” Maney says. “And the definition of a signal is that it elicits a response in the receiver. Previous studies hadn’t approached the question from that angle, and it’s an important one.” Earp reviewed studies that mapped human neural responses to music through brain imaging. She also analyzed data from the Maney lab on white-throated sparrows. The lab maps brain responses in the birds by measuring Egr-1, part of a major biochemical pathway activated in cells that are responding to a stimulus. The study used Egr-1 as a marker to map and quantify neural responses in the mesolimbic reward system in male and female white-throated sparrows listening to a male bird’s song. Some of the listening birds had been treated with hormones, to push them into the breeding state, while the control

Justin Bieber, watch your back: A male white-throated sparrow belts out a tune.

group had low levels of estradiol and testosterone. During the non-breeding season, both sexes of sparrows use song to establish and maintain dominance in relationships. During the breeding season, however, a male singing to a female is almost certainly courting her, while a male singing to another male is challenging an interloper. For the females in the breeding state every region of the mesolimbic reward pathway that has been reported to respond to music in humans, and that has a clear avian counterpart, responded to the male birdsong. Females in the non-breeding state, however, did not show a heightened response. And the testosterone-treated males listening to another male sing showed an amygdala response, which may correlate to the amygdala response typical of humans listening to the kind of music used in the scary scenes of horror movies. “The neural response to birdsong appears to depend on social context, which can be the case with humans as well,” Earp says. “Both birdsong and music elicit responses not only in brain regions associated directly with reward, but also in interconnected regions that are thought to regulate emotion. That suggests that they both may activate evolutionarily ancient mechanisms that are necessary for reproduction and survival.” A major limitation of the study, Earp adds, is that many of the regions that respond to music in humans are cortical, and they do not have clear counterparts in birds. “Perhaps techniques will someday be developed to image neural responses in baleen whales, whose songs are both musical and learned, and whose brain anatomy is more easily compared with humans,” she says. Earp, who played the viola in the Emory orchestra and graduated last May, is now a medical student at the Cleveland Clinic. So what music makes her brain light up? “Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ suite,” Earp says., Source: eScienceCommons

Read More........→February 03, 2013