Music Facilitates Learning

Students learn faster when they can use mnemonics, rhymes, and songs. Facts learned through mnemonics, rhymes, and songs are also retained much longer than facts learned using other methods. Teaching through musical songs help to create the organizational structures that can be used to build language, mathematics, and other important skills.

A recent study in San Antonio, Texas shows that musical responses are widely distributed throughout the brain rather than localized in a single region as are other kinds of information such as vision or movement. The findings also show that the structure of music and people's use of it are similar in key respects to language structure and use. That fact that the right-brain region for notes and musical passages corresponds to the left-brain region for letters and words illustrates how a neural mechanism that may be present in each of the two brain hemispheres becomes specially adapted for similar purposes but with different information or contexts.

According to The Center for New Discoveries in Learning, learning potential can be increased a minimum of five times by using 60 beats per minute music. The average retention rate of students learning with music is 92%; and students had a recall accuracy rate of almost 100%, even though they had not reviewed the material in years.

Therapies used in treating brain injuries include utilizing music and song in order to regain use of the damaged regions.

Treatment of children with verbal communication challenges, such as stuttering, include music and song.


Lyric-writing Facilitates Learning

Students love to create their own memory rhymes and songs. Having this as a classroom activity allows a student to personalize the facts which may be more challenging and requires more focused attention in order to learn and remember.