One group received piano lessons, another private computer lessons, and a third either studied singing or had no special lessons at all. Researchers believe that music calls on abilities that increase student capacity to learn in other areas. Musical learning, for example, helps students develop such mental skills as concentration, symbol recognition, and memory. Some researchers go so far as to say that musical activity repatterns neurons to improve cortical functioning. Staging an actual performance also teaches students the value of cooperation and collaboration.
Musical training appears to function on several levels.
At the same time, music can lead students through a series of victories that give them a sense of the necessary sequences of learning and pacing. Their pictures of themselves as learners become more realistic and each student develops a better idea of how she or he learns. The work of Howard Gardner, of Project Zero at Harvard University, has shown that each of us has a mixture of different ways of learning. Gardner points out that people are born with all intelligences but usually only one or two are fully developed in any individual. Once a learner has identified the way she learns best, it is important that she not try to learn only in that one way.