Nonmusical Effects of the Kodály Music Curriculum in Primary Grade Children

 lrving Hurwitz, Ph.D.; Peter H. Wolff, M.D.; Barrie D. Bortnick, Ph.D.; and Klára Kokas, Ph.D.

 Published in the Journal of Learning Disabilities,

Volume 8, No. 3, March, 1975

 Abstract: This study compares the performances of two matched groups of primary grade children on tasks of temporal and spatial abilities. One group received an intensive exposure to the Kodály Music Training Program, while the other group did not. The results indicated that the music group performed more effectively on both temporal and spatial tasks than the non-music control group. Sex differences are also reported in which experimental group boys demonstrated a significantly better level of performance than control boys. Comparison with a second control group indicated that children receiving the Kodály Music Program performed more effectively on reading tests than comparable groups of first graders not receiving this music instruction. This facilitative effect on reading performance was observed beyond the first grade level when the music program was continued.

 
The Kodály system is a form of music education for young children, starting at the kindergarten level. The training is based on a carefully worked out sequential curriculum in which folk songs are used to teach the basics of music. Aimed at training all children and not just the musically gifted, it uses such techniques as signs, games, clapping, reading musical notes, rhythmic notation, and, most centrally, singing.

Because of the many-faceted perceptual and cognitive training offered in the system, it has long been suspected both by those teaching and those observing this method that it has implications for children’s learning abilities in not only musical areas but nonmusical ones as well. In  Hungary,  where  the  method  originated, school teachers have frequently  noted  that normal school children receiving daily Kodály music instruction perform better in reading and arithmetic and have better “study habits” than children who receive less intensive music education  (Kokas  1969). Also, exploratory research in Hungary indicates the potential impact of Kodály music instruction on such things as visual observation, spelling, language learning, and movement (Kokas 1969).

The study reported here was designed to test the effect of the Kodály method of music instruction on sequencing skills, spatial abilities, and academic achievement patterns of normal American children from middle class communities.

While the focus is on the method’s effect on normal children, the inquiry, we feel, also has important implications for children with various kinds of social and academic difficulties. In previous publications it was reported that boys with learning disabilities and boys with histories of adjudicated delinquency, most of whom showed poor academic performance, have greater difficulties in sensorimotor rhythmical tasks and simple verbal tasks requiring the sequential organization of isolated verbal elements than boys of the same age and social class but with good academic records and no history of antisocial behavior. These two clinical populations did not differ from their normal controls on tests of spatial abilities or perceptual re- structuring (Hurwitz et al. 1972).

Children with learning disabilities showing primarily language problems were significantly poorer on tasks of sensorimotor sequencing and the perception of auditory rhythmical patterns than normal children with whom they were matched for age, sex, intelligence level, social class,  chronological  and  mental  age  (Visco 1973, Birch & Belmont 1966). On the basis of these findings, we have made the assumption that learning disorders may be associated with generic difficulties in sequencing abilities and related skills. This inference is thought to be compatible with observations by others who have related results involving difficulties with sequencing and temporally organized behavior to specific learning disorders in children of normal intelligence (Zigmond 1966).

At the primary grade level, the development of rhythmical skills is stressed to a major degree in the Kodály program. The primary grade musical phase of the program begins with teaching children folk songs from which the instructor abstracts basic rhythmic as well as melodic units. Through a step-by-step process, the Kodály instructor makes the child aware of these rhythmic entities in music and in turn uses these to create new rhythmical constructions which the child may use in new combinations.

The child becomes involved in musical activities on a strong sensory and motor basis with significant emphasis on the rhythmical patterns expressed through these modalities. Recognition of rhythmical structures is experienced by visual symbols placed on a black- board.  The teacher may actually transform these symbols into a body experience by tapping out a rhythmical pattern on the child's shoulder; or the rhythmical structure of a folk song may first be sung and then the body moved according to the rhythmical pattern; or the structure may even be built out of children’s standing at various distances from one another, the differential distances representing the relationships of the notes in time, thus combining temporal and spatial processes.

In addition to this rhythmic emphasis, other aspects of the method may affect a child’s development in areas besides music. Probably important to a potential influence on reading is the method’s strong and sequential approach to the teaching of singing; it may provide valuable training in the ability to listen and pay attention. The method is also involved in other skills, such as the ability to discriminate between visual symbols, to connect them with sounds, and to remember both auditory and visual symbols.

The present study was designed to test the following hypotheses: Musical training, with an initial emphasis on motor rhythm in the early stages of the primary grade curriculum instruction program, will have an influence on the sequencing behavior and on tasks of spatial functioning as well. Second, this facilitating effect of the music program, as well as other aspects of the training connected with pitch and musical notation, can be demonstrated on measures of academic performance such as reading.

It should be emphasized that this is a study of the impact of such a special music instruction program on normally functioning children; it was not intended to supply remedial experience for children with demonstrable deficits as far as academic performance is concerned.

The method and results are reported in terms of first, comparisons made on research measures of temporal and spatial abilities, and second on tests of academic achievement. 

STUDY OF SEQUENCING AND SPATIAL SKILLS SUBJECTS

  Twenty children (10 boys and 10 girls) with no academic difficulty were selected from a first grade group in a middle class suburban school system where the Kodály instruction program had been provided for approximately seven months at the time the comparisons were made. This group is identified in this report as the experimental group. The Kodály classes were held five days a week for approximately forty minutes per session and were taught by an experienced music instructor. A second group of 10 boys and 10 girls was selected from a suburban first grade in another middle class school system with academic standards and student population similar to those from which the experimental sample was drawn. However, this group received no Kodály music instruction and is identified as the control group. The two samples were matched for age (± 3 mos.), IQ (± 5 points), social class (using the Hollingshead- Redlich Two-Factor Index), and for ordinal position in the family. There were no significant group differences on any of the selection variables (see Table I.). None of the children in either group had any known intellectual, social or physical handicaps as recorded in school records or in direct reports from teachers.

PROCEDURE

 The experimental and control children were tested with the following psychological measures to determine sequencing skills and spatial abilities (Hurwitz, et al. 1972, MacFarlane- Smith 1964):

Sensorimotor sequencing:  The child was instructed to tap two mechanical keys, alternating the left and right hands and maintaining a steady rhythm. Each trial lasted 45 seconds, and five trials under different conditions were administered to each subject. The subject was allowed to practice with the keys until he could manipulate them easily and until he understood the instructions. The five trials were variations of three basic instructions:

(1) Tapping at a preferred rate which is comfortable for the individual, although he must maintain as regular a beat as possible.

(2)  Tapping in time to a metronome and continuing to tap at the same rate when the metronome was turned off 15 seconds after the start of the trial; 72 beats per minute and 120 beats per minute were used as the metronome entraining rates.

(3) Tapping in time to a metronome and maintaining the initial rate after the metronome rate was changed (either speeded up or slowed down) 15 seconds after the beginning of the trial. For this condition, a shift from 120 beats per minute to 72 beats per minute and a shift from 72 to 96 beats per minute were used.

Tapping performance was recorded on magnetic tape and analyzed by computer (PDP 9, PDP 15). The performance was analyzed for (1) deviations from expected training rate set by the metronome (except in the case of preferred rate), and (2) variability of peak-to-peak intervals between successive pulses, for the entire 45-second trials.

 Verbal perceptual sequencing: The subject is taught to perform to the point of overlearning a set of simple repetitive acts whose isolated elements present little or no intellectual difficulty. The tasks were used as symbolic analogues of sensorimotor repetition tasks on the assumption that good performance is predicted on the ability to sequence or “automatize” the task in question (Broverman et al. 1960). Sequencing tasks included the naming of repeated objects by identifying three familiar pictures (fly, tree, cup) presented 100 times in random order on an 81/2- by 11-inch card, as well as the three cards of the Stroop Color- Word-Interference Test.  Performance was scored as number of seconds required to complete each of the tasks.

The tests of perceptual restructuring were introduced as a contrast to sequencing skills. Those measures selected were heavily weighted for “spatial abilities” as defined from other studies utilizing factor analytic methods. These include the Beery-Buktenica Visual Motor Integration Test, the Children's Embedded Figures Test, the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices,  the  Graham  Kendall  Memory-for- Designs,  and  the  Block  Design  and  Object

Assembly subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC).

Two measures of general verbal intelligence were included:  the Comprehension and Vocabulary subtests of the WISC.

RESULTS 

The  results  are reported  in  terms  of  the comparisons  made  on  research  measures of temporal and spatial abilities, and on tests of academic achievement.

Table II compares the performance of the experimental and control groups, on the re- search measures described earlier. Superiority of performance was observed on four out of the five so-called spatial tasks. The experimental group performed significantly better than controls on three of the five sensorimotor tapping tasks. Superiority of performance was demonstrated in accuracy scores, defined as the extent of deviation from the metronome training rate as  well  as  in  the  stability  of  the  tapping performance as defined by intertrial variability of  pulse-to-pulse  interval. 

The training conditions in the sensorimotor tapping in which no significant differences were observed was at 120 beats per minute (see Table II). In previous studies we  had found that normal children between the ages of five and 13 years found it easier  to  follow  this  entraining rate  more accurately than other rates used in our protocol - for example, 72 beats per minute, 96 beats per minute, 152 beats per minute (Hurwitz & Wolff, in press). A rate of 120 beats per minute is also preferred by most individuals when asked to tap at a rate that is considered most comfortable for them subjectively (Solberger 1965). While the training rate of 120 beats per minute did not discriminate between normal children who had or had not received Kodály training, this rate has been found most sensitive in discriminating between normal boys and boys with learning disabilities (Visco 1973).

Since the incidence of school performance problems is consistently reported as higher in males than females, and in view of our own and others' findings that sex differences in temporal and spatial abilities can be demonstrated at the primary grade age level, we analyzed our data according to sex differences. The findings indicate that boys in the experimental group were better on three of the five sensorimotor tasks (excluding training conditions at 120 beats per minute), on two of the three verbal sequencing tasks, and on three of the four spatial tasks, including the Block Design subtest of the WISC.

Girls in the experimental group did not perform better on any of the items than girls in the control group. There were no significant differences between experimental and control children of either sex on the Verbal WISC subtests administered. Thus, in the area of temporal and spatial cognitive activities taken in themselves, boys appeared to benefit from the Kodály program while girls showed no appreciable increment.

STUDY OF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

SUBJECT COMPARISONS

(1) Trained children vs. controls. The effect of the Kodály music training on academic achievement was analyzed by a comparison of school records of first grade children who had had a year's Kodály instruction and first grade children who had received no Kodály instruction. It should be emphasized that in this comparison the control group consisted of children in the same school system as the Kodály group and were not children tested on measures of temporal and spatial ability. The Metropolitan Readiness Test is routinely administered at the start of the first grade school year for children in this system. The results of this test showed no significant difference between children who had received Kodály music instruction and those who had not received this training. At the end of the first grade year, however, on the reading scores of the Metropolitan Achievement Test, Primary I, the overall reading percentile for the experimental  group  was  87.9  and  for  the control group, 72.3. This difference is significant (χ2= 8.01; p < .01).

(2) Results by sex. In breaking the above results down by sex, the results showed that non-Kodály class boys scored higher on overall readiness measures than boys in the experimental group (χ2 = 3.82; p.< .05), while girls did not differ in readiness measures. At the close of the first grade year, girls in the experimental group scored significantly higher on overall reading percentiles than did the control group girls (χ2 = 3.83; p < .05), while there was no difference between the boys.

The Kodály training would appear to have qualitatively different sex effects, inasmuch as the research tests of temporal and spatial abilities did differentiate the two groups of boys while measures of school achievement did not. Boys with Kodály instruction performed better on our research test measures after eight months  than  boys  who  did not have such training, while boys who had the music program did not differ from those who did not in reading scores.  However, girls in the experimental group scored significantly higher on reading achievement test scores than girls in the non-Kodály classes. The apparent paradox in the  differential  outcome  between  cognitive measures  and  academic achievement  results may be resolved when we recall that boys in the experimental  group  had  scored  significantly lower than the control group on the readiness percentile scores at the beginning of the first grade year. The fact that the two groups of boys did not differ in reading achievement at the end of the first grade suggests that both boys and girls in the Kodály program did in fact benefit from special music instruction, so that the boys' results indicate a compensatory effect for their initial relative deficit in reading readiness.

(3) Effects of teaching styles. Differences in the classroom teaching styles can certainly influence the effectiveness of academic performance and could confound the influence of Kodály instruction. Therefore, we undertook to examine the outcome of classroom experience by reviewing children’s achievement levels with the same teachers, comparing scores for Kodály and non-Kodály years.

The reading scores of children in these two years prior to the introduction of the Kodály music instruction program were compared with each other, as well as with the scores of those pupils with the same teacher after one year of Kodály instruction.  Two such classes were available for these comparisons. (Reading readiness scores at the start of the first grade did not differ between any of the classes - that is to say, all children appeared to start at about the same baseline.) In the two years prior to the introduction of the Kodály program, one year's first grade achievement scores on the Metropolitan Test were not significantly different from another's. However, the scores of children who had received a year's Kodály instruction were significantly higher than the scores of children taught by the same classroom teachers in the year prior to the installation of the Kodály program.

Percentile Scores

Teacher A

Without Kodály   78
With Kodály         86.9

χ2 = 6.36; p<.01

χ2 = 8.93; p<.01

It was concluded that group differences in academic performance could be related to the instruction in the Kodály music program regardless of differences in classroom teaching, since each teacher in these comparisons operated as her own control, to the extent at least that classes from year to year did not differ in either social, intellectual or motivational characteristics.

(4) Comparison at end of 2nd grade. Finally, the children in the two Kodály music classes were again compared with the children in the neighboring school that did not have Kodály, this time at the end of second grade. Thus, the experimental group had had two years of Kodály training. On the reading scores of the Metropolitan Achievement Test Primary It, the overall percentile for the experimental group was 90.2, and for the control 83.5.  This difference is significant (χ2 = 5.36; p < .01) and represents the apparent continuity of the possible influence of Kodály instruction on reading skills beyond the first grade level.

DISCUSSION

A program of music instruction involving a systematic presentation of rhythmic elements as well as those of pitch and tone was found to improve the performance of normal children on a wide range of psychological test measures, including the stability and accuracy of sensorimotor rhythmic behavior, the sequencing of verbal symbols, the solution of problems of perceptual restructuring and spatial abilities. Furthermore, the method appeared related to the acceleration of reading skills insofar as conventional achievement test scores were higher for children who, in the first grade, had received a special music instruction.

The transfer effect of the music program to spatial abilities and reading achievement was of particular interest because it suggested possible new avenues for helping children with disabilities in reading which extend beyond the explicit matter of reading per se to intervening with such generic processes as rhythmic behavior and serial organization. 

The results were striking in that those children who received the Kodály training turned out to be better readers and were presumably receiving less of the usual instruction in reading by the regular classroom teacher, since class time was designated as the period for the 40-minute daily Kodály program. The Kodály instructor may have generated so much enthusiasm for school in these students that the increment in motivation carried over to general class work. Many of the children enrolled in the program did in fact show considerable interest in their Kodály classes. It might be argued that any innovation which improves the child's learning skills is a welcome addition to the repertoire of special education techniques regardless of the way in which it works. The specificity of this transfer effect remains obscure.

Before the Kodály method or any similar specialized program should be applied systematically as a remedial procedure, the mechanisms of transfer must be better understood and the limits of its effectiveness must somehow be specified. Perhaps the most obvious link of the school subject of reading to the method is the training of sensory discrimination processes.

 The teachers provide children with visual symbols in the reading of music which assists with the task of discriminating between symbols and between the rhythmical and tonal characteristics that these symbols present in their configuration. The child is given training in visual observation and connecting the visual and the auditory modalities through the medium of rhythm and pitch. The visual symbols for rhythmic patterns in the Kodály method are themselves simple, expressed by combinations of horizontal and vertical lines. Concurrent with this visual training the child reuses these symbols actually as bodily activity in clapping, marching, tapping, etc.

Rhythm instruction in the Kodály program really begins with intense and explicit training in sensing the regular beat of a song. Throughout the year the child is encouraged by his bodily action in such activity as clapping, nodding, walking, standing, in the regular pulse of the songs and rhymes he or she is learning. It is only after the introduction to this basic beat that  the  child  is  taught actual  rhythmical configurations  and  through  these  he  learns connections with patternings of original beat experiences. This kind of systematic rhythmic development which the training provides can influence the child's general sequencing ability and through this can potentially have an effect on other areas of cognitive development.

The psychological mechanism by which the Kodály method influences cognitive functions is without question complicated, and many of the variables introduced by the technique cannot be experimentally controlled. Yet, an analysis of the transfer of learning must be resumed as a subject of psychological interest where it was left off to a large extent in the 1940s (Gibson 1949), if the large domain of learning disabilities is to be resolved in a rational way. We believe that a systematic application of the Kodály program of music instruction to elementary or primary grade children, with and without learning disabilities, may provide one avenue for studying transfer effects in a natural learning context. An analysis of the academic deficiencies to which the program can make the greatest contribution, comparison of cognitive styles of children who do and those who do not respond  favorably  to  this  method,  and  an analysis  of  sex  differences  in  response  to specialized music training may clarify how the systematic exercise and development of sensorimotor sequencing may be related to complex  transformations of  symbolic  processes, including reading, and thus improve children's academic performance.

These musical and nonmusical relationships to general development suggested in the Kodály program are at this stage purely speculative in their formulation. Again, it should be pointed out that while our previous studies did focus on the role of sensorimotor deficits in temporal sequencing and serial organization in the behavior of pathological populations, the present study focuses as it does on normal populations as a means of pointing the way toward possibilities for remedial intervention in learning disabilities represented in clinical populations.

For example, two of the author's works to date (Wolff & Hurwitz 1966, 1973) suggest that many children with learning disabilities have a generic difficulty in sequencing. At the same time the curriculum content of current public school education heavily emphasizes skill in the sequencing of verbal material and erroneously equates such skill with intellectual competence. Many children of normal intelligence who are deficient in sequencing skills but very competent  in  spatial  abilities may therefore be misdiagnosed  as  having  low  scholastic  and intellectual potential (Kuffler 1969). Such children might benefit most from a program of Kodály music instruction - especially if their deficiency were identified before school entry and if special  music  instructions  could  be offered to them in kindergarten or during the first two years of elementary school.

The Kodály music instruction program is obviously not a panacea for all learning problems. It seems clear, however, that some important benefits may be derived. It is an important aim of future analysis and experimentation to discover more fully what these benefits might be.

Children's Hospital Medical Center, 300 Longwood Ave., Boston, Mass. 02115.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was supported by NIMH Research Grant #1 MH-18332 and by  individual and foundation contributions to the Kodály Musical Training Institute, 525 Worchester St., Wellesley, Mass. 02181.