![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Three years later Blackwell graduated from Atlanta’s Morehouse College with a sought-after four-year math degree. He came up with the novel idea that connecting music to math is a creative, engaging, and stimulating method to grasp even the most complex formulas. It was only during his sophomore year of college that Blackwell finally connected the dots. And throughout K-12 he was a proficient multi-instrumentalist but lacked confidence in math, which he describes as “math phobia.” He has been playing piano since he was five-years-old and is classically trained in jazz and gospel. “Traditional math lessons are taught so that math is feared.” Math Phobia To Impactful Teacherīlackwell’s entrepreneurial journey is deeply personal. The issue is the way that math is taught, adds the Connecticut native who now resides in Atlanta. I want to help kids use music to learn math, to help them embrace a daunting subject while having fun.” “The reason Make Music Count works so well is because we use songs that our students listen to at home. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.“It’s time for education to have a culturally relevant approach,” says Blackwell. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. ![]() NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. GREENE: Martin Bergee's study on the relationship between music, math and reading was published in the Journal of Research in Music Education.Ĭopyright © 2020 NPR. (SOUNDBITE OF ROCK PERFORMANCE OF MOZART'S PIANO SONATO NO. And if you eliminate subjects like music, you eliminate the ability to learn others, like math and reading. But he says it could provide important context for school districts that are considering budget cuts to music programs.īERGEE: If I were a school board, I would want my goal to be the education of the whole mind. KING: Bergee cannot explain why that relationship exists, and he knows that his study doesn't exactly settle the debate. (SOUNDBITE OF JAZZ PERFORMANCE OF MOZART'S PIANO SONATO NO. The relationship not only remained strong, but it remained very strong. The link was actually really strong.īERGEE: They were the opposite of what I was expecting. GREENE: But isn't the beauty of research you don't always end up finding what you expected? After studying more than a thousand mostly middle school students, he discovered he was wrong to be so skeptical. KING: And Bergee's goal was to disprove the link between music, math and reading. (SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE OF MOZART'S PIANO SONATO NO. His research eliminated other factors that might account for why music students typically have such good math and reading scores.īERGEE: The sex of the participant, the ethnicity of the participant, the economics of the family - all told, I think there were probably somewhere between 15 and 20 variables. KING: So he spent 10 years on this study. MARTIN BERGEE: In fact, I was absolutely convinced that the link - once other things that are controlled for and accounted for, that the link between music achievement and math achievement and reading achievement essentially disappears. He's a music professor at the University of Kansas, and at first, he did not buy into this idea that there's a link. Is there a link between studying music and being better at math and reading? Scientists have been studying and debating this for a long time, and a new study has some really interesting findings. ![]()
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