What's New in Pedagogy Research (Professional Resources‪)‬

Does music make you smarter? The influence of music study and music listening on cognition and learning continues to be a hot research topic. One sometimes takes these projects with a grain of salt; however, a study titled The Effect of Piano Lessons on the Vocabulary and Verbal Sequencing Skills of Primary Grade Students (1) appears to have successfully controlled the variables of demographics, native intelligence, parental support and other factors that can indirectly affect the findings of this type of research. Several research studies have suggested that music and literacy are parallel systems in a number of ways: both written text and notation must be decoded for meaning, both are read from left to right and top to bottom, and the oral components of inflection and fluency have similarities to musical phrasing and performance. Recent studies of the brain have indicated that the processing networks for music and language may overlap.