In
talking about the need for a well-rounded education, Secretary Duncan
has consistently invoked the importance of keeping arts in the mix. Over
the past three years, researchers at Northwestern University have
teamed up with the Harmony Project, a nonprofit instrumental music
program based in Los Angeles, as well as public charter schools in
Chicago, to investigate just how important the arts are to learning.
Harmony Project works with students, such as Fatima Salcido, who
enrolled in group violin classes during middle school. Since then, she
has been a high achiever. Through diligent practice, Fatima earned her
way into private lessons and membership in the Hollywood Youth
Orchestra, one of Harmony Project’s most elite ensembles. In addition to
these activities, during her last two years of high school Fatima gave
weekly private violin instruction to a less-advanced musician as a
volunteer peer mentor. Fatima has gone on to earn a full four-year
scholarship to Tulane University, where she is currently a neuroscience
pre-med major and a member of the Tulane University orchestra.
Looking at Fatima’s success and that of others in Harmony Project,
Northwestern is conducting a longitudinal study that investigates the
impact of music education on child and adolescent brain development. In
particular, neuroscientists are evaluating how music education affects
learning skills, communication abilities, and biological development in
underserved, grade-school-aged children participating in Harmony’s
mentoring program.
On July 25, 2013 at 3:30 p.m. EDT, the
U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts
will host a webinar focused on this research. The NEA’s Federal
Interagency Task Force
on the Arts and Human Development has been working since 2011 to
encourage more and better research on how the arts can help people reach
their full potential in all stages of life. Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles
professor of neurobiology and physiology and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory
at Northwestern, is the principal investigator. One research question
she is trying to answer is “Can music offset the ever-widening academic
gap between rich and poor?” Preliminary results of her research suggest
that it can.
According to Kraus, many scientists have written about a link between
music and reading. In learning to read, the learner must have an
auditory representation of a sound if it is going to be linked to a
visual image (letter).
The research scientists in this study have measured the nervous
system’s activity in response to sound. When people hear sounds, neurons
fire, and those neural events can be measured. This measurement shows
that musical training has a positive effect on biological processes
important for auditory learning, memory, and hearing speech in
challenging listening situations (e.g., noisy classrooms), which appear
to translate into better language learning results. Northwestern’s
findings have the potential to provide valuable information for
educators, clinicians and policymakers interested in the potential of
music to nurture academic success, particularly among students from
low-income homes.
“We’ve already discovered that the biological processes that underlie
reading skills are the very processes that are strengthened by music
training,” Kraus says. “What we don’t know—and what this research in
schools is trying to assess—is whether musical education, delivered in
school-based group settings, will have the same impact on these
fundamental biological processes.” The Webinar on July 25, will further
illustrate the research and its implications.
Another example from the Harmony Project illustrates why scientists
are curious about this project’s ability to affect a student’s academic
ability. Christian Martinez enrolled in Harmony Project in
elementary school. He was an ESL student until he reached 6th grade,
and by the second half of 6th grade Christian was moved to a regular
English class. By 7th grade, Christian was placed in an honors English
class. Christian explains that he moved up in his English classes by
applying the same lessons he learned studying violin. Christian will be a
junior in high school this fall. Currently, Christian earns (dual
enrollment) college credit from Los Angeles City College for his
participation as a principal player in an intermediate-level Harmony
Project orchestra and as a section member of an elite Harmony Project
orchestra.
SOURCE : http://www.ed.gov/blog/2013/07/research-suggests-positive-impact-of-music-education/#more-15671
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