Music and Development

Facts on Growth: Babies to Young Adults

While experts warn that it's too early to get excited about magically turning children into superlearners with a wave of the baton, here's a sampling of what some researchers have observed in their experiments:

• Preschoolers who had keyboard training did better at math reasoning than another group that had computer training instead.
• College students who had received musical training before age 12 remembered significantly more words from a list than other students.
• Infants can distinguish differences in pitch, melody and rhythm from very early on. In fact, they even seem to recognize music they were exposed to repeatedly in the womb.
• Students who received daily music training for seven months had higher reading scores at the end than did a control group. A year later, their scores were still higher than the control groups.
• Preschoolers were able to learn body parts better in a lesson that used music and dance as opposed to conventional lessons, or even one including movement but no music.

source:  www.eduguide.org