{"id":2044,"date":"2017-05-27T08:00:05","date_gmt":"2017-05-27T08:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=2044"},"modified":"2017-12-26T21:48:27","modified_gmt":"2017-12-26T21:48:27","slug":"the-potential-benefits-of-high-school-music-classes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/the-potential-benefits-of-high-school-music-classes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Potential Benefits of High School Music Classes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AdobeStock_66165135_Credit\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Should 9th graders\u00a0start music classes–even if they’ve never played an instrument before? Are there academic benefits to studying music? Is 9th grade too late a start to get those benefits? Should my school’s STEM program become a STEAM program?<\/p>\n

A recent study<\/a> by Adam T. Tierney offers some answers to these compelling questions.<\/p>\n

The Short Version<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tierney & Co. followed 19 high school students who\u00a0enrolled\u00a0in a high school music ensemble, and compared them to 21 students at the same school who started a JROTC program.<\/p>\n

These groups started off nicely matched in various academic and linguistic measures. However, at the end of 4 years, the group that had studied music improved in some suggestive ways.<\/p>\n

First, the neural signatures of their response to speech changed meaningfully; oversimplifying a bit here, they were “more mature.”<\/p>\n

Second, the musicians improved more than the JROTC participants in their ability to distinguish between and manipulate language sounds.<\/p>\n

Reasons to be Excited<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Tierney’s study gives us several reasons to perk right up.<\/p>\n

For example: we’ve known for a long time that life-long musicians have these language processing benefits. Now we have good reason to think that even those who pick up an instrument later in life get them as well.<\/p>\n

Another example: this study compares the musicians to the JROTC participants. That is, it does not<\/span> compare them just to some random collection of non-musicians. Like these new musicians, the JROTC students had a highly disciplined practice schedule, had to function in a structured group, and so forth.<\/p>\n

Because the study includes this “active control group,” we can be sure the results don’t come from–say–just being part of an organized school activity.<\/p>\n

Most exciting: the students’ improvement in their ability to process language sounds<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This ability–called “phonemic awareness”–gets a lot of research attention, because it can predict success in several essential language skills<\/em>: reading and writing, to name two.<\/p>\n

We test phonemic awareness in many ways. For instance:<\/p>\n