Taken from broaderminded.com a site of the National Association for Music Education.
Music Helps Educate the Whole Student
What is the role of music in educating our nation's students? Today's educational culture places a high value on quantifying academic achievement. Gauging student progress and learning is clearly important, but the true mission of education lies in shaping the students behind the scores, and "Bubble Tests" can only measure so much. Studies have proven that there are positive links between engagement with music and academic achievement, but that data is only part of the bigger picture. Music does something even more important - it shapes the way our students understand themselves and the world around them. It allows for deep engagement with learning. It nurtures assets and skills that are critical to future success, including creativity, curiosity, determination, and motivation. Music helps develop the student behind the score. In other words. It's time to think beyond the bubbles - join the broader-broader movement.
Music's Role in Academic Success
Academic Achievement
Brain Development
Fills Gaps
- Improved Reading Skills - The combined results of 30 studies indicate that music instruction has a significant and positive effect on reading (Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, 2008).
- Higher Grade Point Averages - High school music students have better grades than non-musicians in the same school (National Educational Longitudinal Study, 1988).
- Spatial Reasoning Abilities - Multiple studies indicate that early music instruction is linked to significant improvements in spatial reasoning (Neurological Research, 1999; Journal of Research in Music Education, 1998; Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2000).
Brain Development
- Processing Sound and Staying Focused - Studies have shown that diligent instrument training from an early age can help the brain remain focused when absorbing other subject, from literature to tensor calculus (Scientific American, 2010).
- Improving Cognition - The cognitive structures developed through music instruction help to expose and illuminate more general organizing structures relevant for other disciplines (Research in Music Education, 2009).
Fills Gaps
- Students Lagging Behind - When given music instruction over seven months, this group caught up to their fellow students in reading and surpassed their classmates in math by 22 percent (Nature, 1996).
- Transcending Socioeconomic Levels - Students in high-quality school music programs score higher on the standardized tests compared to students in schools with deficient music education programs, regardless of the socioeconomic level of the school or school district (Journal of Research in Music Education, 2007).
- Music May Help Students Stay Engages With School - Schools with music programs have significantly higher graduation and attendance rates than do those without music programs (Harris Interactive, Inc, 2006).
Argument for Music
Inherent Benefits
21st Century Skills
- Emotional Awareness - Students learn to express themselves in multiple ways and become more sensitive to the preferences and feelings of others
- Reflective Learning - Students reflect on failures and successes through the creative process and derive a sense of their own competencies, interests, and challenges.
- Process Orientation - Students develop the ability to consistently refine their thinking as part of the creative process, developing an ability to re-evaluate goals and objectives and, if needed, their approach to the objective.
- Decision-Making - Through both the creative and reflective learning process, students gain greater capacity to question, interpret, and influence their own lives.
- Grit - In a high-level performance environment, hard work and dedicated practice predict success far more than innate ability. Music performance offers opportunities to fail. Students learn the value of persistence, and of working hard for an uncertain outcome.
- Multiple Ways of Knowing - Music study promotes fluency in knowledge systems beyond the linguistic and mathematics enabling a deeper and broader understanding of our world and of the human experience.
21st Century Skills
- Creativity - Students learn to think about problems from a variety of viewpoints and increase problem-solving skills.
- Collaboration - Through working together to create a finished product, students learn to incorporate different approaches and to leverage individual strengths for a higher-quality outcome.
- Communication - Students learn to convey ideas and emotions through musical performance; in doing so they develop a greater awareness of nuance, complexity, structure, emphasis, and theme, which can enhance verbal and written communications skills.
- Critical Thinking - Through the creative process, students strengthen their skills in synthesizing and evaluating information, and apply these skills to changing their assumptions and actions.