The purpose of this study was to determine whether music instruction was related to significant gains in the development of young children's phonemic awareness, particularly in their phoneme-segmentation fluency. Beginning in January 2004 and continuing through the end of April 2004, each of four intact classrooms of kindergarten children ( n= 43) from one elementary school were taught music by one of four advanced music-methods students from a nearby university. Kindergarten children ( n= 60) at a second elementary school served as the control group. An analysis of the data revealed that kindergarten children who received 4 months of music instruction showed significantly greater gains in development of their phoneme segmentation fluency when compared to children who did not receive music instruction, t=−3.52, df= 101, p= .001. The results support a near-transfer hypothesis that active music-making and the association of sound with developmentally appropriate symbols may develop cognitive processes similar to those needed for segmentation of a spoken word into its phonemes.December 14, 2004August 1, 2005

173The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of music training on preschoolers' Performance IQ (Wechsler Preschool and Primary Intelligence Scale-Revised, 1989). Preschoolers in the treatment group (N = 15) met weekly from October 1996 through April 1997. A Mann-Whitney test on Performance IQ (scaled) gain scores by group yielded U = 67, p = .059; a Mann-Whitney test on Performance IQ (raw) gain scores by group yielded U = 65, p = .049. Regressions of IQgain scores on age showed significantly less gain for older children in the control group (N = 15). A regression analysis showed that the relationship of Performance IQ to age was not significant for the treatment group. Slopes intersected at age 3. For 3year-olds in this study, an intellectually stimulating environment, per se, results in a gain in the ability to perform spatial-temporal tasks.The results of recent psychological research, discussed widely in the popular press, emphasize the importance of an intellectually stimulating environment for the developing young child (see, for instance, Begley, 1996; Blakeslee, 1997; Zucker, 1994). On the basis of showing a significant effect for keyboard training on preschoolers' ability to assemble puzzles rapidly and accurately, psychologists concluded that music may be an important form of stimulation for the young childone that generalizes to competencies outside music (Rauscher, Shaw, Levine, Wright, Dennis, & Newcomb, 1997).In The Psychology of the Child, Piaget and Inhelder (1969) advanced a theory about how, through self-directed interactions with their environment, children construct knowledge. Given an environment in

The purpose of this study, grounded in near-transfer theory, was to investigate relationships among music sight-reading and tonal and rhythmic audiation, visual field articulation, spatial orientation and visualization, and achievement in math concepts and reading comprehension. A regression analysis with data from four high schools (N = 98) in the American Midwest yielded a 4–variable model that included reading comprehension, rhythmic audiation, visual field articulation, and spatial orientation, F = 21.26, p < 0.001, accounting for 48% of the variance on music sight-reading. The results support previous studies in music education, cognitive science, and neuroscience that have shown that music reading draws on a variety of cognitive skills that include reading comprehension, audiation, spatial-temporal reasoning and visual perception of patterns rather than individual notes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of children's invented notations as a measure of their musical understanding. Notations were compared on the basis of their inventor's performance on tests of perceptual discrimination, performance by singing and playing, and their age. Sixty children aged between 4 and 8 years were tested for their perceptual discrimination with the rhythm and tonal subtests of the Primary Measures of Musical Audiation (PMMA) (Gordon, 1979). After each child reproduced a short folk song by singing and playing, he or she was asked to "write the way the song sounds". Three independent judges scored the children's singing and playing for their tonal and rhythmic accuracy and the children's invented notations for indications of tonal and rhythmic awareness. A correlation of all independent variables showed scores on PMMA rhythm, PMMA tonal, singing, and playing and the child's age to be significantly related. Because of the multicollinearity among variables, a principal components analysis was performed that extracted one factor and assigned a factor score to each subject. Inventors were divided into two groups. Mean factor scores for each group of inventors were compared using a one-way ANOVA. Significant differences (F = 39-12, p<-001) were found between musical understanding factor scores for groups of inventors. The higher the musical understanding factor score, the more likely the notation reflected pitch awareness. Likewise, inventors were grouped according to rhythm awareness. Mean factor scores for groups were found to be significantly different (F= 24*41, p< 001). The higher the musical understanding score, the more likely that the notation embodied an awareness of rhythm. The results of this study suggest that skills in perception and performance, as well as age, may contribute to musical understandings that are reflected in children's invented musical notations, lending evidence to the validity of children's invented notations as a measure of their musical understanding.

This article reports the findings of a research project that investigated the nature of the teaching and learning process in music composition. Over the period of one semester, the formal interactions in one-on-one study sessions between an eminent composer-teacher and an experienced graduate student-composer were videotaped. Following the generation of video data, separate interviews were conducted with the composer-teacher and the student-composer in order to probe each of these participants’ perceptions of the nature of the teaching and learning process in which they were engaged. Analyses of observational and interview data were framed within a social constructivist perspective and drew on notions of the zone of proximal development, a problem-finding attitude and creative collaboration. The teaching and learning process in musical composition in this study emphasized problem finding and problem solving by composer-teacher and student-composer within a social relationship characterized by reciprocity and collaborative dialogue in which possible solutions were discussed, negotiated and trialed.