LEARNING AIDES
Ten minutes of classical music a day won't score you a better IQ, says a recent study debunking Frances Raucher, Ph.D.,'s "Mozart Effect." Raucher's theory, which sparked Mozart mania for six years, fell flat when Kenneth Steele, Ph.D., of Appalachian State University was unable to replicate the results.
But don't toss the tapes just yet. Irving Hurwitz, Ph.D., and his 1975 Harvard research team determined that studying the solfege (the do, re, mi's) helped first-graders achieve significantly higher reading scores than a control group that had no such training. And on a different note, based on a 1991 study, Takashi Taniguchi, Ph.D., of Kyoto University concluded that sad background music helps students memorize negative facts, like the death toll of a war, whereas cheerful music helps them remember positive facts, like when electricity was invented. And in an ongoing study, Gordon Shaw, Ph.D., of the University of California at Irvine, has found that preschoolers studying the keyboard achieve higher math and science scores than the control group, producing a 34% increase in their puzzle-solving skills. So there just may be magic left in Mozart's flute.
