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Music and art lessons do more than complement three Rs
Monday, April 13, 1998 By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Want to give the brain a good workout?
Try making music or doing art.
"Children not only enjoy the arts but learn a great deal from it," said Sarah Tambucci, principal of Chartiers Valley Intermediate School and past president of the National Art Education Association.
She thinks the arts can stimulate learning, help with memory and foster creative problem-solving.
Researchers are bolstering that argument made by arts educators in two main ways:
Studies that link music training with math-related skills.
The theory of "multiple intelligences," which shows that people learn in many ways, some of them through the arts.
The theory of multiple intelligences was developed by Harvard University Professor Howard Gardner, whose book "Frames of Mind" was first published in 1983.
Gardner says there are at least eight forms of intelligences, which people have in varying amounts: language, logic, musical, spatial, bodily, naturalist, interpersonal and intrapersonal.
"A good educational system ought to nourish and nurture the range of intelligences, which include several featured in the arts. Otherwise, we will be neglecting important forms of human potential and stunting the cognitive development of youngsters," Gardner said.
"All youngsters everywhere should have exposure to the greatest creations of the human mind and spirit in our society. That would include painters like Rembrandt and Picasso, musicians like Mozart and Duke Ellington, writers like Shakespeare, George Eliot and Toni Morrison."
Ideally, Gardner said, students should be exposed to all art forms at all ages, but he doesn't think that's practical. He favors depth over breadth, allowing each child to choose an art form to master well enough to create in it and appreciate it.
Other researchers have focused brain-related studies on music.
Teaching music to preschoolers and kindergarten pupils helps to develop their spatial-temporal reasoning, according to research by Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and Gordon Shaw of the University of California at Irvine.
This skill is needed to understand geometry, proportions and how objects fit together in time and space.
The studies usually offer keyboard education, complete with reading music, improvisation, playing by ear, pitch, rhythm and creativity exercises. Rauscher said she didn't find significant improvements with just basic sing-alongs.
"The firing patterns (of neurons in the brain) that are relevant to music cognition are relevant to spatial-temporal ability," said Rauscher. "Music training requires mental imagery and temporal ordering of the notes."
She was intrigued enough by results of a pilot study with just five low-income children that she has begun a bigger study with 400 preschool children. She wants to see whether music training on a keyboard can have a lasting effect on spatial-temporal skills in low-income children.
"The most glaring deficiency in economically disadvantaged kids is in their spatial skills, abstract reasoning that relates to math," said Rauscher. "I felt if we were going to make an impact, we could make it the most with disadvantaged children ... These are children whose parents can't afford to take them to music lessons."
While there aren't enough studies yet to tell how much instruction is best, Rauscher said, "if anything, you should be giving more time to music rather than cutting back on it."
Other researchers also have found a link between music and math.
Martin Gardiner, a visiting scholar at Brown University at the Center for the Study of Human Development, said the types of mental processing -- such as organization, production of melodies and learning pitch -- needed for making music also help students to learn math.
"Once you learn how to organize and use a scale in your thinking, that may make it easier for your brain to organize and use a number line," he said.
He said the music helps to provide "mental stretching."
"Your mind is now different than it was before," he said. "It's stretched out in some particular area and now has a new capability which can be applied, it seems, in other areas."
This conclusion is based on several studies, including some still under way, in which elementary school students and eighth-graders improved their math abilities through music education. The programs emphasized music-making, sight-reading at a keyboard, or using a computer to compose music. Gardiner said it can take one to two years to see the effect.
Using spring 1997 information, the Pittsburgh School District has developed its own statistics to show that students who were in instrumental or choral classes had higher grade point averages, higher graduation rates, better attendance and lower dropout rates.
The average GPA for gifted students with one to two years of music was 3.45, compared with 3.19 without music.
Among students overall, those without music training had a dropout rate of 7.4 percent; those with one to two years had a rate of 1 percent; and those with three or more years had a 0.0 percent dropout rate.
Aside from how the arts can enhance the overall process, some arts supporters say that arts also should be learned for their own sake.
So why is music so often considered extraneous? Natalie Ozeas, chairwoman of music education at Carnegie Mellon University and Eastern Division president of the Music Educators National Conference, has a theory.
"Perhaps because it's such an enjoyable thing to do," she said, "that somehow making music doesn't seem to fit into the same category as doing your homework."
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