PIANO AND COMPUTER TRAINING BOOST STUDENT MATH ACHIEVEMENT

--Second-Graders in UC Irvine Study Scored Higher Than Others on

Fractions and Proportional Math--

BUENA PARK, CA — Yamaha Corporation of America, in continuing its commitment to the importance of music education, supplied keyboards and music lab consoles for the latest research led by Physics Professor Emeritus Dr. Gordon Shaw from the University of California at Irvine. According to the findings, taking piano lessons and solving math puzzles on a computer significantly improves specific math skills of elementary school children. These results, published in the March issue of the journal Neurological Research, are the latest in a series that links music training to the development of higher brain functions.

"Yamaha is a corporation dedicated to enhancing people’s lives through music, so it was a natural for Yamaha to be involved with this research," says Yamaha Senior Vice President Terry Lewis. "This latest study pinpoints what music making does for children, giving school districts and parents concrete evidence from which to make decisions about how music education should be woven into their children’s daily lives."

Researchers worked with 135 second-grade students at the 95^th Street School in Los Angeles after conducting a pilot study with 102 Orange County students. Used in the study were two Yamaha MLC Laboratory System teacher consoles, each linked to 10 Yamaha keyboards. Children given four months of piano keyboard training, as well as time playing with newly designed computer software, scored 27 percent higher on proportional math and fractions tests than other children.

To demonstrate that it was not just the math software creating the result, the research team tested different combinations to isolate the causes of the increased math ability. Children who took piano lessons and played with the math software performed better on tests of fractions and proportional math than children who took English language instruction on the computer and played with the math software, and better than those who had neither piano lessons nor experience with the math software. Puzzles in the STAR game allow children to apply the type of mental acuity that appears to be heightened by piano practice. The findings are significant because a grasp of proportional math and fractions is a prerequisite to math at higher levels, and children who do not master these areas of math cannot understand more advanced math critical to high-tech fields.

"Proportional math is usually introduced during the sixth grade, and has proved to be enormously difficult to teach to most children using the usual language - analytic methods," says Dr. Shaw. "Not only is proportional math crucial for all college-level science, but it is the first academic hurdle that requires the children to grasp underlying concepts before they can master the material. Rote learning simply does not work."

Each keyboard training lesson began with ten minutes of listening to piano music. The study focused on Mozart piano sonatas, because to date, experimental data is available only for the effect of Mozart Piano Sonata K.448 on the enhancement of spatial temporal reasoning. During piano instruction children were taught basic musical concepts: finger number associations, clef signs, rhythmic values and identifying letter names on the staff and on the keyboard. Students learned to read and play simple melodies for right hand alone, left hand alone, and both hands together.

"Piano instruction is thought to enhance the brain's ‘hard-wiring’ for spatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to visualize and transform objects in space and time," says Dr. Shaw. Music involves ratios, fractions, proportions and thinking in space and time.

"Students who used the software and played the piano also demonstrated a heightened ability to think ahead," says Dr. Shaw. "They were able to leap ahead several steps on problems in their heads," he notes. These findings offer not only new insight into the theory of mental development, but also a potentially powerful teaching tool, capable of stimulating second-grade children to master critical sixth-grade reasoning concepts. The piano teaching and software helped children regardless of income level, boosting achievement of students in low socioeconomic settings.

"This study, and previous others linking musical training to the learning process, make a good argument for keeping music programs in the schools," says Yamaha Music Education Manager Cheryl Landru. "It also indicates that integrating music into other curricula is icing on the cake."

Prior UCI studies based on a mathematical model of the cortex predicted that early music training would enhance spatial-temporal reasoning, and a 1997 study indicated that preschool children given six months of piano keyboard lessons improved dramatically on such reasoning.

Shaw is known for his 1993 research that showed college students scored higher on spatial-temporal reasoning tests after listening to a Mozart piano sonata. Dubbed the "Mozart Effect" by media, the phenomenon prompted further interest in research to explore the relationship between music, intelligence and learning.

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