Findings
Music To Their Eyes: Music lessons--and even simply listening to
music--can enhance spatial-reasoning skills. That conclusion comes from
a set of small, ongoing studies at the University of California at
Irvine. Researchers there observed 33 3-year-olds enrolled in two Los
Angeles County preschools. They gave 19 of the children weekly 10- to
15-minute keyboard lessons and daily 30-minute singing sessions. The
rest of the children didn't receive the special lessons. At the end of
four months, the children who had music lessons were already outscoring
their peers on tasks that required them to rearrange pieces of a puzzle
to make a picture. And the gains continued over the course of the
eight-month study. (The two groups of students performed similarly well
on tasks that did not require spatial-reasoning skills.) In a previous
study, the researchers--Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw--found that
listening to 10 minutes of a Mozart piano sonata increased the spatial
IQ scores of college students. Spatial-reasoning skills are critical
for scientists and engineers, the researchers write in a paper
presented at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting
last summer. "We hope our research will help convince public school
administrators of how crucial music instruction is to all children,''
they said.

What's The Subject?: A report published in the September 1994 issue of
Developmental Psychology offers some insights for educators trying to
teach young children about sentence structure. Researchers Fernanda
Ferreira of Michigan State University and Frederick Morrison of Loyola
University at Chicago followed 48 5-year-olds for two years. At the
start of the study, half of the children were just entering
kindergarten, but the other half were a few weeks too young to start
school. The researchers periodically asked the children to identify the
subjects in as many as 96 sentences. In the beginning, most of the
children--even those who hadn't yet started school--could name a simple
subject in a sentence. They had trouble, though, when the subjects were
pronouns or consisted of a string of words. By age 7, however, most of
the children successfully picked out the pronoun subjects--regardless
of whether they were in 1st grade or kindergarten. "Whatever factors
are responsible for this specific difficulty with pronouns seem to
exert less effect as children become older,'' Ferreira and Morrison
write, "not as they become more schooled.'' By contrast, the children's
ability to name two- and three-word subjects did improve with
schooling.
--Debra Viadero
Vol. 06, Issue 04, Page 1-24
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