Improving Academic Achievement - Research Paper Example

PRACTICAL PROJECT IN TEACHING How Does Auditory Stimulus in Conjunction with Visual Representations Affect Learning Music for a Child Who is Three Years of Age? The purpose of this practical project in teaching will be to test the ability of a child in the early stages of development to translate what she hears and sees to a mimicked achievement in music, and then associate that achievement with written symbols. The hope will be that this will create a foundation for later achievement in mathematics which can be studied in a wider scope of research that is done over a longer course of time with a sampling of participants. Introduction One of the most important subjects in a child’s life is that of mathematics. Research has shown that mathematical learning can be enhanced through learning musical principles (Aronson, 2002: Harkleroad, 2006). This raises the question of whether learning to play music at an earlier age can create a deeper significance in mathematical scores. Children might benefit from early exposure to a musical education as this exposure has the possibility of showing an increase in the recognition of ratio and spatial relationships in mathematics. There are methods such as the Suzuki method (Kendal, 1985) of teaching children as young as three to play music instruments and this has been shown to provide a natural learning of music as a primary language form. A research study that teaches music to a young child might show later benefit in the educational experience. It has long been understood that there is an association with learning to play music and with learning mathematics. The way in which a child understands fractions and spatial relationships can be positively affected after learning to understand musical principles. Aronson (2002) relates a study done by Graziano, Peterson and Shaw in 1999 that tested second grade students after dividing them into four groups teaching them with either keyboard instruction with spatial temporal training , English instruction with spatial temporal training , spatial temporal training alone, and with no additional training for a control group. The results of the test were that those with musical training had significantly higher mathematical scores than did those in the other groups (p. 274). The goal of this study will be to test the ability of a child at the age of three to learn a simple song on the piano, and to then make an association with the notes she has learned to play with notes on a page organized on a staff and labeled with the names of the notes as referenced by letters. The subject of this preliminary test will be a three year old girl that we will refer to as Kaleigh. With the approval of her parents, she will be tested through musical play to see if she can learn through auditory stimulation and then translate what she has learned to recognizing written representations. If successful, this type of learning can be developed to create a deeper educational experience for younger children in regard to music, which might then provide a foundation for stronger learning capacities in mathematics. Aim and Objectives Aim The aim of this pilot project is to test the capacity of a three year old child in learning to play a simple song on the piano through mimicry and auditory stimulation, and then to see if the symbols of the notes can be taught and associated with the action of playing the music she has learned. Objectives To determine whether or not something learned through the auditory senses can then be turned around and applied through association to literary learning. To better understand the process of learning through alternative methods of teaching. To make a preliminary assessment as to whether this form of learning can be used to enhance math skills by exploiting the connection between music and mathematics through this type of learning in early childhood. Methodology In approaching the goals of this practical study it will be important to make a preliminary assessment as to whether Kaleigh is interested in the type of learning that will be required for the testing. In order to do that, three preliminary sessions will be used to assess her general interest in the project. The ways in which this will be tested have been researched in Machover and Uszler’s book, Sound choices: Guiding your child's musical experiences. The first approach will be to play three games from Machover and Uszler’s book to assess whether or not Kaleigh can pay attention to the music with enough interest to create a viable study. The following three ‘games’ will be played with Kaleigh to assess her attention span and interest: Sound Conversation, Play Me a Picture, and Mirror Sound (Machover and Uszler, 1996, p. 10-12). The first ‘game’ that will be played with Kaleigh will be to ‘talk’ to her through sounds, making up a musical language with her to see if she will respond with her own made up sounds. The second ’game’ that will be played will be an art project. A piece of music that appeals to Kaleigh will be chosen in order to see if she can maintain participation for fifteen minutes. While the music is playing, Kaleigh will be provided with crayons and paper and asked to draw what she hears. This game will assess how willing she is to focus on music and create an association of her own with the music. The third ‘game’ will create the most crucial assessment for the feasibility of this study. According to Machover and Uszler (1996), Mirror Sound should be played by creating an imitation of the sounds that the child makes (p. 10). However, for the purposes of this study, the game will begin with imitation of the sounds that Kaleigh will make to introduce her to the concept. Then the game will switch to see if she is interested in imitating the sounds she hears. These sounds will begin with vocals, but then move to the notes on the piano that she will eventually be asked to learn. At this time, she will be encouraged to imitate vocally what she hears, but also by putting her fingers on the keyboard. Kaleigh has expressed interest in the piano and has frequently played random notes and imitated the posture and position of playing music. An advanced knowledge of her interest will help in the attempt to teach her a piece of music. The point of the exercise is not to teach her proper positioning, but to test her ability to learn and to make associations. She has already exhibited a knowledge gained through imitation of how to touch the keys, arch her fingers, and sit on the bench the way she has seen others sit in order to play. Kaleigh has learned to recognize the alphabet and to recognize certain words in her favorite books based on the repeated readings of those books and her mother pointing out key words during the story telling process. This ability allows for a reasonable expectation that she may be able to learn to associate the music she will learn with notes on a page. The length of time to learn this recognition and the length of time she will retain that information is subject to the results of the test. Kaleigh will be taught the song Mary Had a Little Lamb, a song with which she is familiar and which contains only four different notes repeated in a specific sequence that she will need to learn. After the song has been learned, she will then be taught the association from the sounds to the written identities of the notes on a large representation of a staff with notes and with the associated letter names of those notes clearly written below each note. No other musical associations will be taught as this could prove distracting and without purpose for this study. An attempt will be made to meet with her at the same time every day in order to create a sense of continuity for the learning program, however some adjustment might be necessary in order to accommodate any needs she may develop that supersede the study. No attempt will be made to designate these sessions as ‘lessons’, but will be treated as a playtime game in order to keep an authoritarian element out of the study. This way, she will not be influenced by any sense that she ‘must’ perform since the period that is available to study her reactions will be limited and her willingness to learn is not at issue. It is hoped that she will participate willingly because she thinks the activities are fun, rather than because she feels pressured. Results The first goal of the sessions was to meet with Kaleigh for three preliminary play sessions and five music learning sessions. It was hoped that the meetings would be done at the same time every day for eight days. Two of the sessions could not be accomplished at the designated time because of one tantrum and because of one day where she was not interested until later because she was distracted by her own little project of building in which she had become engrossed. The first three preliminary ’game’ days were very successful. The first ’game’ we played was Sound Conversation. During our play, Kaleigh responded to my sounds initially with mimicry, but then moved to making her own sounds. Of course, this ’language’ has been continued well beyond the original initiation of the game and has become a ritual form of play for her. She has begun to initiate this form of play with her family members as well. During Play me a Picture, we played the song the Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round and in response she drew circles all over her paper in yellow. When we changed the music to an unfamiliar piece, she used a variety of colors to represent both what she was hearing, but also to represent her boredom with the unfamiliarity of the piece. However, for the first few moments, she was engaged with the activity. The third and most crucial game was Mirror Sound, where I spent some time mimicking the sounds that she would make while we were coloring in coloring books, and then encouraging her to mimic the sounds that I would make. This was successful in short intervals, which was expected as this kind of exercise can become tedious. The results of the five sessions of on the piano had mixed results. The first session was highly successful as Kaleigh was very interested in learning to play the notes to Mary Had a Little Lamb. In order to play the song, when the thumb is considered 1 and the little finger is considered 5, the rhythm of the song is as follows: 3 2 1 2 3 3 3, 2 2 2, 3 5 5, 3 2 1 2 3 3 3 3 2 2 3 2 1. The first session lasted 25 minutes where she was able to learn the first phrase of the song which was 3212333 through watching and listening as I played and sang the song. At the next session, she was unable to play the first phrase until it had been repeated for her several times, however she caught on to the phrase quickly and remembered the sound and the rhythm. On the day of the third session, Kaleigh was upset over a tantrum that she had shortly before I arrived and was uncooperative and didn’t want to play. However, after she had calmed down and had engaged in some other forms of play, she initiated playing the piano and was able to very closely remember how to play the phrase. During the course of the sessions a large representation of a musical staff with the notes to the song and the letters of the notes sat on the piano and we verbally referred to this as her sheet music. When it became clear after the second session that the first phrase of the song was going to be as far as these sessions would take her within the limited time of the research, the music was folded to represent just the first seven notes. During the fourth session an introduction to the concept of associating the sounds she was creating on the piano and the notes in front of her was made to encourage her to make the connection. During this session, she was very clear about which written note represented which sound on the piano. In the seven note phrase, three notes on the piano are used. The final session was delayed as her interest could not be attained. After engaging in play with her under her terms, she eventually was willing to play the piano with me. During this final, session she was able to play the phrase and some of the rest of the song with some help. Her ability to name the notes, point to the notes she was playing on the sheet music, and to recognize which note was associated with which written representation seemed to have been achieved. Some prompting and reminding was necessary, but it was clear that in the short term, she was able to roughly remember what she had learned. Discussion The way in which Kaleigh was initially taught to play the song was through singing the notes while simultaneously playing the notes on the piano. This occurred for three days with no reference to the sheet music other than to have it present during the sessions. During the fourth session the notes were pointed out as the song was played until instead of the words of the song, the letters of the notes were sung, which Kaleigh thought was very funny. However, she learned to sing it this way and made the connection between the notes and the letter representations immediately. Whether or not she truly understood what that meant was difficult to assess. As she was able to learn to point out the notes that corresponded to the keys played on the piano, the test had a preliminary result of being successful and warrants the possibility of a larger study. As Kaleigh is three years old, she is in the early stages of the preoperational stage of Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. During this stage, symbolic representations can be connected to objects and ideas. As well, imitation is one of the primary methods of learning during this stage (Lee, 2000, p. 32). These aspects of Piaget’s theory correspond to the way in which Kaleigh was able to learn the phrase of the song. She imitated and made symbolic connections for the music. The other way in which Kaleigh was able to learn music in her stage of development was because of how focused the learning at her age is on language skills. The Suzuki method formulates music into a language form for its very young students in order to transform this stage of learning into high performance capabilities. Through the creation of a “mother tongue” of music, a child can interpret musicianship as if it is a primary language (Fink, 2005, p. 222). The way in which to understand this is by considering the way in which the language that is spoken at home is learned in those early years as compared to trying to learn a secondary language later in life. This is the same as learning music at this stage compared to later stages. Conclusion If learning music can increase mathematical performance and learning music at a very young age can make it a primary language, then an early education in music should provide a measurable increase in the ability to learn mathematics. To truly provide a comprehensive study of this theory, research done on children from the age of three through the age of ten would be beneficial in recording the results of the understanding of music in comparison to the mathematical achievement level that could be learned. The results could be compared to a sampling of similar age children who did not have the benefit of the music education. An alternative study could be conducted on children of the age of ten who have had the opportunity to learn music from an early age previous to admission to the study, however this would create some limits on the results as the rate of advancement would be more difficult to trace. As a preliminary test, teaching Kaleigh within a short time frame to play Mary Had a Little Lamb was a successful exercise. Through explicit teaching methods, she was taught a basic phrase and become moderately competent in playing the entire song. When the associations were introduced implicitly to the written symbols, the beginnings of an understanding of the associations of her actions as represented within written form began to create a mental connection. However, it must be noted that since the study was done over a condensed time period this connection has not, to date, been maintained. However, her desire to play songs on the piano has not diminished and she has continued to learn to mimic music. The results do show promise as a method of increasing the mathematical, achievements through life with an early introduction to an adaptation of a musical language as part of the early development. If it is true as Aronson (2002) and Harkleroad (2006) have proposed that a musical education increases mathematical skills, and if it is true that the Suzuki Method creates a “mother tongue” for the very young learner (Kendal, 1985: Fink 2005), then creating a method of musical teaching that includes associations to written symbols and providing an incorporated, cognitive understanding of the associations of mathematical principles might prove to be beneficial. If methods of teaching music to young children are developed with the goal of increasing mathematical conceptual awareness, overall understandings of disciplines that require mathematical computation will also benefit. This approach has the possibility of increasing educational proficiencies and establishing early comprehension levels for educational development. List of References Aronson, J. (2002). Improving academic achievement: Impact of psychological factors on education. Educational psychology series. San Diego, Calif: Academic Press. Fink, R. W. (2005). Repeating ourselves: American minimal music as cultural practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harkleroad, L. (2006). The math behind the music. Outlooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendall, J. D. (1985). The Suzuki violin method in American music education: A Suzuki method symposium. About Suzuki. Princeton, N.J.: Suzuki Method International. Lee, K. (2000). Childhood cognitive development: The essential readings. Essential readings in developmental psychology. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Machover, W., & Uszler, M. (1996). Sound choices: Guiding your child's musical experiences. New York: Oxford University Press. Read More