EDUCATION

The class is gathered at one end of the gym. Half the kids are walking around in a tight little clump in time to a deliberate beat, led by the versatile Susan Purdy, an actor turned music educator who’s teaching this Learning Through the Arts (LTTA) session at Seneca Hill School in Toronto. This is not gym. It’s science class — taught through music. Sounds like heresy, but looks quite effective, and the concepts are right out of the Ontario grade-five science curriculum.

While Purdy plays a hand drum, the other half of the class joins in on various shakers, rattles and tambourines, and the marchers keep the beat by banging little sticks together. Suddenly Purdy picks up the pace and the kids follow suit on their instruments. The marchers speed up and begin to spread out. Turns out this lesson is about energy transfer: The students are water molecules being heated up by a uranium bundle in a nuclear power plant. (When water is heated, each molecule moves more quickly and further apart from the others, hence the change in movement signalled by Purdy’s drum.)

Later in the lesson the kids shuffle along the floor, representing electrons moving along power lines. Then they pretend to be atoms joining together and breaking apart, and chant a rap about the pros and cons of various energy sources — all of this to musical accompaniment, either their own or one of the many selections Purdy has cued up on the boom box.

LTTA is about teaching core academics through arts-based activities — geometry through dance, social studies through visual art, French through drama, science through music. It was developed in 1994 by the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and now operates in more than 12 cities across Canada, as well as in Stockholm and New York. The core idea behind it is that learning — anything — is enhanced when you mix in music, art, theatre and dance.

There’s no doubt banging drums and making like molecules in the gym beats the heck out of sitting in a class staring at the blackboard, but does it really improve student achievement?

Enter the research — lots of it.

Rena Upitis and Katharine Smithrim, professors of education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, did a three-year study which included the effect of LTTA on language and math performance. Using standardized tests, they compared the achievement of 467 students in grade six from schools participating in LTTA with 281 grade sixers from two types of control schools. They found that although there were no significant differences in most areas of language and math, the LTTA students scored higher in computation (basic arithmetic) and estimation. The differences were statistically significant, too big to have happened by chance.

Smithrim and Upitis can’t say for sure why the LTTA students did better in these two strands of math (but nothing else), however they believe that “engagement” had something to do with it. “Engagement means that children are wholly involved, physically, emotionally, intellectually and socially,” says Smithrim. “In interviews and surveys, students, parents, teachers, artists and principals from the LTTA schools all talked about how the arts seem to engage children in learning.”

This isn’t the first time researchers have found an apparent link between the arts (music, most commonly) and achievement in mathematics. In fact, the music-math connection has been publicized to the point where it’s taken for granted. But is it really true? Can studying music make you better in math?

Here’s the down and dirty: The effect of music on math is not the definitive, proven link some people make it out to be. But it’s not nothing either.

Lots of studies have found a connection between learning music and doing well in math. However, as Upitis notes, “most of that research is correlational, but people often claim it’s causal.” In other words, you can show that kids who study music tend to do well in math or school in general, but it’s very hard to sort out what caused what.

Fortunately, every once in a while, a smart person comes along and takes a look at all the research in a given area, discarding the bad studies and casting a critical eye at the good ones. Kathryn Vaughn, of Boston’s Berklee School of Music, did this with music education and math performance. Her conclusion: There is “a small causal relationship.”

A number of factors go into how well kids do in math, including their parents’ education and socio-economic status. Smithrim says that individual characteristics of each child, notably “how smart kids are,” account for 85 to 90 percent of the variance on academic scores in most studies.

There are two reasons to take the music-math connection seriously, however. One is that it keeps coming up over and over again. The other is that researchers tend not to find similar strong connections between music and other subjects. Even non-musicians could imagine that some of the brain activity required for music — discipline, dedication and the ability to connect notes on a page with sounds and the hand movements required to play an instrument — might well transfer to other academic areas. Although some research has linked music and reading, more often it shows improvement in math but not in other subjects.

One of the best-known examples is a 1996 study that found enhanced arts instruction improved the math scores of primary students in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Control classes in the study took the regular art and music curriculum: one hour of art one week and an hour of music the next. The other classes received an extra hour of both art and music per week. After two years, 77 percent of the enhanced arts students scored at grade level or above in math compared to 55 percent of the controls. What’s even more striking, and what got this study published in the prestigious journal Nature, is that when the researchers went back and looked at the kindergarten test scores of the kids, they found that the treatment group had actually started out behind the control group.

Martin Gardiner, visiting research associate at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and lead author of the study, brings an interesting perspective to his work. He has a PhD in biophysics and a scholarly background in psychological brain research, and he’s also an avid musician. Gardiner believes that there are similar brain processes at work in developing a strong sense of musical pitch and understanding and using numbers.

“The key to this study was that students in the enhanced arts developed some specific capability in music,” he says. The extra music instruction was based on the Kodály method, which, among other things, required students to learn to sing on pitch together. “In order to understand something — really understand it, as opposed to simply repeating something you were taught by rote — you have to have a way of thinking about it and representing it in your mind,” Gardiner says. “Both pitches in a musical scale and numbers increase from step to step from lower to higher. The representations are different, of course, but I think they require a similar way of understanding and using information.”

His theory is yet to be proven but other research has found a demonstrable connection between musical thinking and another kind of higher-order thinking called spatial-temporal reasoning — the ability to visualize and manipulate shapes and objects in your mind.

The seminal research in the area is the famous — notorious, in some circles — “Mozart Effect” study, also published in Nature (1993). Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky tested college students on spatial tasks from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. They found that students performed better after listening to ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major than after listening to a spoken word relaxation tape or ten minutes of silence. The effect lasted only a few minutes and was restricted to this one relatively unknown area of human intelligence. But the media jumped on it and soon it was spun into claims that listening to Mozart made people (especially babies) smarter — even though not a single one of the studies involved babies.

The study has been replicated many times, often in hopes of debunking it. Some researchers found no effect, leading to yet another Nature article, which spoke of the “requiem for the Mozart Effect.” However, many other researchers found the same thing as Shaw and Rauscher. Larry Morton, of the University of Windsor in Ontario, got the same results with Pink Floyd music (the Pink Floyd Effect?). Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto found a similar improvement in some students who had listened to a story instead of music. He concluded that the key was which pre-treatment, music or story, the student enjoyed more.

The more substantive research in this area, though, has to do with music instruction, not listening. In three separate studies, including a recent one involving at-risk children, Rauscher found that music lessons improved the spatial-temporal reasoning abilities of four- to six-year-olds. She looked for improvements in other areas but couldn’t find them. “We’ve tested verbal abilities, short-term memory, vocabulary, copying tasks and found no difference between children who had music lessons and those who didn’t,” Rauscher explains. “But we found that children who take music lessons score up to 35 percent higher on spatial tasks.”

What’s going on in the brain linking musical and spatial skills? While studying the neural networks used in higher brain function, Gordon Shaw and Xiaodan Leng of the University of California, Irving, mapped brain patterns and assigned musical tones to help mark changes in neural activity. When they played the sequences back it sounded musical. “They weren’t actual melodies,” explains Mark Bodner, one of Shaw’s associates. “But they sounded suprisingly similar to recognizable styles of music rather than random sequences of notes.”

This got them thinking that there was some inherent relationship between music and the structure of the human brain. If that were true, perhaps music might enhance higher brain function. The cognitive ability they chose to test was spatial-temporal reason.

More recently Shaw and Bodner have done brain-imaging studies that showed that the same parts of the brain were active when listening to Mozart as when engaged in tasks that require spatial-temporal reasoning — like doing puzzles and playing chess. They believe listening to music “primes” the brain, warms it up and gets it ready to do spatial tasks. They also believe spatial-temporal skill is directly related to being able to understand fractions and ratios; their current research is exploring this.

Does this mean we should hustle four-year-olds into piano lessons so they’ll be better at puzzles? Should we increase music programming in schools to boost math test scores? There’s a real dilemma here. On one hand we’ve seen considerable evidence that involvement with music and, more importantly, the development of musical skills enhances other aspects of cognitive function. But should that be the raison d’être of music education? No other subject has to justify itself by improving achievement in another academic area. Why should music?

When you pull all the threads together, what emerges is that it matters less whether music improves math performance, but that it’s an elemental part of human neurology. Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who has studied the way the brain processes pitch, has concluded that our brains are “wired for music” in much the same way they’re wired for speech. Music isn’t merely a cultural artifact, he says, but a natural product of the way our brains are structured.

None of this has been fully proven yet, but it makes sense given what we already know. We all respond to music. Music is found in every culture, and research with infants suggests that humans have a developmental path for understanding music not unlike those for speech and walking.

No small wonder then that music, this core area of cognition, might improve other kinds of learning. Nor should it come as any surprise to see students at Seneca Hill School so thoroughly absorbed in their Learning Through the Arts session. What is surprising is that music and the other arts are considered less than core academic subjects, and continue to be at the front lines of the education scythe. Where’s the study on that?

For more info about Learning Through The Arts, check out ltta.ca

Originally published in Today's Parent, October 2003