Studies supporting children's cognitive benefits from music are revisited in this interesting paper.
by Daniel Kobialka, D.M.A.
Music is widely believed to have many benefits for children beyond the value of the music in itself. These benefits are thought to improve reading, the mental rotation of representations of objects, and creative thinking, to name just a few cognitive abilities.
Recently, studies were revisited that supported these beliefs. It was found that music facilitates reading by improving the stage where the learner can make the correspondences between the visual and spoken parts of words. Musical activities that teach pitch discrimination enhanced the same ability in learning information about words.
A group of children who were given instructions by song and by acting out movements in the form of a dance showed the greatest improvement in both learning about body parts and tests of creativity.
The abstract cognitive ability to mentally rotate objects is a common means of assessing spatial abilities. After four months, a music-assisted group was superior to the control group on the test of spatial abilities but not on other tests of intelligence. Improvement was even greater eight months after the start of music training, which seems to indicate that improvement was not due simply to the extra attention and enriched experiences, but that the experiences were musical in nature.
You can read the entire document about Music and Cognitive Achievement in Children.
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