A study published in the journal Nature in May 1996 helped bolster the link between music and learning a little further. Martin F. Gardiner, now a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Development at Brown University in Providence, R.I., was the researcher in a team study involving six 1st grade classrooms in two public schools in nearby Pawtucket. Students in two of the classrooms received the type of music and visual arts instruction typically found in many schools across the country. Four other classrooms of students were taught to sing using the Kodaly method. That approach, developed by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, emphasizes singing songs that are sequenced in difficulty.
Students also play musical games involving rhythm and pitch.
At the end of seven months, the students getting the specialized musical training were doing the same or slightly better in reading than their counterparts in the control group. At the end of two years, the Kodaly-trained students were still ahead of their classmates in math. And, among them, the best-performing pupils were those with two years of musical training. There seemed to be this special boost for math. Mr. Gardiner has since repeated versions of his experiment with students in the later elementary grades and arrived at similar conclusions.