‘Mozart Effect’ Goes Only So Far, Study Says

By Mary Ann Zehr

Learning to make music and acting out stories can improve certain thinking skills in children, but those activities will not raise students' grades or SAT scores, according to a study released last week by Harvard University's graduate school of education.

"There have been a lot of claims made that the arts make kids do better in school," said Ellen Winner, a senior research associate at Project Zero, the division of the graduate school that conducted the study, and a co- researcher of the project. "The claims exceed the evidence."

Ms. Winner and her colleague, Lois Hetland, analyzed nearly 200 studies of arts education from the past 50 years. They concluded that when children learned to make music, it improved their spatial-temporal reasoning—a process that Ms. Hetland described as "the ability to flip or rotate or turn images in your head through...