This research could be music to your ears…
TES|November 01, 2019
Schools should resist putting additional time and resources into yet more English and maths lessons and instead give children’s learning a research-evidenced boost by encouraging them to join a band or an orchestra, says Martin Leigh
Martin Leigh
This research could be music to your ears…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that playing an instrument helps children in many aspects of school life – well, at least in the fraternity of music teachers it is. Until recently, however, we have been in want of evidence to support our theory. These are big claims that are tricky to test: it’s tremendously hard to prove that instrumental music-making trains and increases a child’s cognitive capacity; that commitment to regular practice and rehearsal can have effects on motivation beyond the rehearsal room; and that succeeding and failing together in an ensemble can change the way we feel about ourselves and the way we relate to others.

This want of evidence is becoming a problem for our children’s education. The recent report Music Education: State of the Nation describes dwindling secondary curriculum hours for music, fewer specialist music teachers and states, yet again, the damaging effects of the English Baccalaureate. Entries for GCSE music have fallen by 18.6 percent since 2014 (Daubney, Spruce and Annetts, 2019).

So we should all sit up and take notice of a new study, published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Education Psychology (Guhn, Emerson and Gouzouasis, 2019). It’s a big piece of work, exploring the records of nearly 113,000 Canadian pupils, and it makes a powerful central claim – that “students highly engaged in music were, on average, academically over one year ahead of their peers not engaged in school music”.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 01, 2019 من TES.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 01, 2019 من TES.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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