The University of California at Irving conducted a study among preschool children to evaluate the effect of music on their spatial reasoning, which is essentially the act of thinking something through and solving the issue at hand. In this study, a group of preschoolers were timed while putting together a puzzle. The children were then split into two groups. One group took weekly piano lessons and daily singing lessons and the other group took no lessons. After four months, the children were timed completing the same puzzles. The children who took music lessons improved at a greater rate than the children in the other groups.
While taking music lessons, especially piano lessons, people use both the right and left lobes of the brain. When children take these lessons from a young age, their brains are stimulated and become used to working together. This increases the child's capacity for learning, making school work easier for her. The brain also becomes able to process information more quickly by fully using both sides of the brain at the same time. Using music that uses the speed of 60 beats per minute can increase a child's learning potential by as much as five times, according to The Center for New Discoveries in Learning.
Learning music requires a child to memorize aspects, such as words, note names, note positions and instrument mechanics. When a child takes music lessons, he must memorize all of these aspects as a part of learning to play an instrument or sing. The more exercise the brain gets in memorization, the easier time a child has with memorization. This extends into his school work. Dr. George Lozanov, a Bulgarian psychologist, used classical music to help students learn a foreign language. With this method, the students were able to pick up the foreign language in half the time and retain nearly 100 percent of the material.
Music can have a positive effect on a child's reading skills. According to a study by Long Island University, students who were routinely exposed to music lessons had a larger vocabulary and better retention of what they had read. While both schools in the study were from the same area, one school routinely taught piano to the students, while the other school did not offer any formal music lessons. The students who received instruction in music had higher scores in vocabulary and verbal sequencing than those students with no musical instruction.
Many studies have been done over the years to prove that listening to classical music can improve the test scores of children. This is known as the "Mozart Effect." The theory behind these studies is that this type of music stimulates the brain. When the brain is stimulated, it is capable of absorbing more information. In many of these studies, students who listened to classical music just prior to taking a test scored higher than those who did not listen to the music at all. Students who listened to other types of music also scored lower. These effects, however, were mostly found to occur over a short period of time and did not last long-term.