Learning in a New Key : Pilot Study Finds Training in Music May Help Preschoolers’ Education

Shakespeare wrote about the “sweet power of music.”

Now scientists are finding that the bard was more correct than perhaps even he knew.

A team of UC Irvine researchers released results of a pilot study Friday that they said strongly indicates that music education stimulates the brains of preschool children and enhances learning. The children in the study could perform certain tasks better after having music training, the researchers said.

“There are growing indications that music serves as nurturing stimulation to exercise the intellect,” Norman Weinberger of UC Irvine said. “Such findings have important implications for the role of music in early learning and school curricula.”

Weinberger and other Irvine researchers discussed their findings at a conference of the National Assn. of Music Merchants at the Four Seasons Hotel.

The scientists presented the findings of the recently completed, nine-month study of 3-year-old children made in two Southern California child-care centers. One center is in Long Beach and the other is a preschool in Costa Mesa, but they were not otherwise identified.

Five children in each center were given a standard test for overall knowledge just before they began learning music. Then, children at the Long Beach preschool participated in group singing as their music education; youngsters in Costa Mesa learned to play electronic keyboards.

After music education began for the children, the researchers tested them again at three-month intervals. Frances H. Rauscher, a psychologist with UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, said the music training at both schools produced dramatic increases in the children’s overall test scores.

“They were (tested on) spatial abstract-reasoning skills,” Rauscher said. “The children were asked to assemble pieces of an object to create something they recognized. For instance there would have pieces of cardboard that when correctly assembled showed the picture of a dog.”

The 3-year-old children could assemble abstract pieces into recognizable pictures much more quickly after they had started music learning, Rauscher said. “Their skills with that particular task increased dramatically (after music training began),” she said.

There was no control group in the pilot study, so there is no comparison to children who did not have the benefit of music training. The researchers said comparisons to standardized test results indicate the children in their study were learning at a much faster rate than the national norm.

Gordon L. Shaw, a UC Irvine physicist who took part in the study, said scientists believe the brain has “certain natural patterns of firing activity that involves sequences.” Music learning probably enhances those natural patterns of the brain, he said.

Shaw and Rauscher said they will launch an expanded study this fall that will involve 50 children given music training, compared to a control group of 25 children not taking music instruction.

Rauscher said that she believes removing music training from schools as a cost-cutting move is a grave mistake. She said, “Our research has the potential to move music to the core of the curriculum in all schools.”