In the last decade, as budget cuts have increasingly stifled arts education, arts advocates have inundated the public with research touting the benefits of music education for other subjects, especially math. Newly published research from the journal Psychology of Music shows music education also may also drastically improve language and literacy learning in elementary students.
Joseph Piro and Camila Ortiz, in a quest to clarify music education’s effect on language and literacy learning, studied students in two US elementary schools. One of these schools offered keyboard instruction, which increased in difficulty over successive years. The other school did not have a music education program. After two years of keyboard instruction, the keyboard-trained students performed dramatically better on tests of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than did the non-keyboard-trained group.
Piro and Ortiz stress that focused studies like this one will “help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches.” Because the neural response to music is one of the most widely distributed systems in the human brain, the study of music can affect many other areas of learning in a positive way, including literacy and spatial perception. The goal, Piro and Ortiz tell us, is to understand how and when to teach music in order to maximize its potential benefits on the brain.
You can read a more detailed description of the study here.
What do you think? Should schools teach music only to boost skills in subjects like math and reading, or should music education be supported for its own sake? Leave a comment below and tell us about it.
