Friday, October 11, 2013

Does Music Help Students Get Better Grades?

Playing music can help teens with their study, reduce stress and depression and provide them with a general feel-good mood.

Music doesn’t necessarily make teens smarter, nevertheless music lessons’ process can help them to use their brain to it's fullest potential. Researcher E. Glenn Schellenberg, Ph.D.  found that music lessons help with boosting kids’ IQ and academic performance, as mentioned in the May 2006 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology. The study showed that music lessons during childhood were strongly correlated with a higher IQ and better high school grades. Moreover, the longer a child has music lessons, the greater the boost. 




According to Northwestern’s Professor Nina Kraus, director of  Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, learning to play an instrument has major advantages for a growing brain and should be a key part of school education. She points out there is strong evidence to show that music lessons help children improve their language skills.
“Now we know that music can fundamentally shape our sub-cortical sensory circuitry in ways that may enhance everyday tasks, including reading and listening in noise” said Prof Kraus.
“Playing music engages the ability to extract relevant patterns, such as the sound of one's own instrument, harmonies and rhythms, from the "soundscape", not surprisingly, musicians' nervous systems are more effective at utilising the patterns in music and speech alike.’

Furthermore, researchers at the University of St Andrews said their findings showed musicians were quicker to pick up mistakes and correct them.
The team said their results indicated musical activity could be used to slow, stop or even reverse age and illness-related decline in mental functioning.



Playing an instrument requires strong mental multi-tasking abilities such as concentration, memory and critical thinking, which abilities are enhanced over time.

Creativity and organization skills are also important during a music composition. A student trains his brain to focus on a particular piece, read the notes, translate them into a tune through combined movements of his body and assess the outcome. That all make a brain get stimulated and get activated in several different levels, just from a simple song.

Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-24297289
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1252652/Learning-play-musical-instrument-helps-young-brains-develop-language-skills.html#ixzz2hPrix8Ru
http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/music-teens-good-grades-school-15619.html
http://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/index.php?q=node/5241

1 comment:

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