Music should make math more enjoyable, keep students focused, and alleviate any math-related fears or anxieties.
Published Date – Thu 23/29 at 4:50pm
U.K: Children do better in math when music is integrated into the curriculum, according to a review of nearly 50 years of research on the topic.
Music is supposed to make math more enjoyable, keep students focused, and reduce math-related fears or anxieties. Motivation can be boosted to give students a greater love of numeracy, according to a peer-reviewed article in Educational Research.
Tips for incorporating music into math lessons include tapping to different tempos when learning numbers and fractions, and using math to design musical instruments.
Previous research has shown that children who do better in music also do better in math. But whether teaching music to young people actually improves their math performance is less clear.
To find out more, Dr. Ayca Akin, a Turkish researcher at the Department of Software Engineering at Antalya Belek University, searched academic databases for studies on the topic published between 1975 and 2022.
She then came up with the answer by combining the results of 55 studies from around the world, involving nearly 78,000 young people, from kindergarten students to college students.
The meta-analysis included three types of music interventions: standardized music interventions (typical music lessons in which children sing, listen to music, and compose), instrumental music interventions (lessons in which children learn how to play an instrument, either alone or alone). or as part of a band) and a Music Mathematics Integrated Intervention in which music is integrated into the mathematics curriculum.
The students took math tests before and after participating in the intervention, and the changes in their scores were compared with those of young people who did not participate in the intervention.
The use of music, whether in a separate lesson or as part of a mathematics curriculum, has been associated with greater progress in mathematics over time. The integrated curriculum had the greatest effect, with approximately 73 percent of students who took the integrated curriculum performing significantly better than students who did not receive any type of musical intervention.
Some 69 percent of students who learned to play an instrument and 58 percent of students who received normal music lessons improved more than students who received no music intervention.
The findings also suggest that music aids in the learning of arithmetic better than other types of mathematics and has a greater impact on younger students and those learning more basic mathematical concepts.
Dr Akin, who conducted the research at the Turkish Ministry of National Education and Antalya Belek University, noted that mathematics and music have many things in common, such as the use of symbolic symmetry. Both disciplines require abstract thinking and quantitative reasoning.
Arithmetic is especially well suited to be taught through music, as core concepts such as fractions and ratios are also fundamental to music. For example, notes of different lengths can be represented as fractions and added together to create multiple bars of music.
Integrated lessons can be especially effective because they allow students to make connections between math and music and provide additional opportunities to explore, explain, and understand math.
Plus, any anxiety students might have about math can be eased if they’re more fun than traditional math lessons. Limitations of the analysis include the relatively small number of studies available for inclusion. This meant that it was impossible to study the influence of factors such as gender, socioeconomic status and music instruction time on the results.
Dr Arkin, who is now at the University of Belek in Antalya, concluded that while music instruction had a small to moderate effect on math achievement in general, integrated courses had a large effect.
She added: “Encouraging maths and music teachers to plan lessons together can help ease students’ anxiety about maths while also improving grades.”
