Music and Math Scores

Music and Math Scores

Third-grade students at a San Bruno elementary school who learned fractions through music scored significantly higher on standardized tests than their peers, said San Francisco State researchers experimenting with ways to teach math more effectively.

Math scores significantly improved after one year of a math-focused music program, which included lessons in drumming, clapping and playing the recorder to help students understand how music is broken down into equivalent fractions.

The specific curriculum, which researchers called academic music, was used to teach students at Allen Elementary to count beats in 4/4 time, breaking down whole notes to eighth notes.

Studies have repeatedly shown that fractions are often one of the more frustrating mathematical concepts to learn - and one of the most important - but the students picked up on things pretty quickly, said San Francisco State researcher Sue Courey.

Fractions - with all their shifty numerators and denominators - become something fun, Courey said. "The kids don't think they're really doing math," she said.

The study, initiated in 2007 and the results released last week, showed test scores soared after the first year of the twice-a-week, 30-minute class with music teacher Endre Balogh, whose nonprofit Toones Academic Music promotes the curriculum.

"It was phenomenal," said Principal Kit Cosgriff.

A more effective way

The results offered insight into how to teach math more effectively, but more than that, gave principals, parents and teachers an academic selling point for keeping music in schools despite budget cuts.

"We have a compelling reason to view music instruction as an integral part of the elementary curriculum due to its utility in teaching beginning fraction concepts and related fraction computation to elementary students," according to the study, which Balogh co-authored. "Furthermore, this intervention appears to be particularly effective for students who are coming to instruction with a lower-than-average understanding of fractions."

While the research focused on third grade, Allen Elementary incorporated the program into kindergarten through fourth-grade classes after seeing the results.

On a recent day, Balogh worked with a third-grade class of 31 students who repeated note patterns playing drumsticks on donated computer mouse pads.

"Peas porridge hot. Peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot, nine days old," Balogh tapped out, asking students to guess the song, one of several they knew from the course.

Then he reviewed how a quarter note was equal to two eighth notes, walking four steps while he clapped either four or eight times.

While confusing to outsiders, the students understood and 20 hands shot up when Balogh quizzed them.

Teacher Gina Grites has seen how those claps and steps have helped her students understand a complicated concept.

"They've been able to correlate the steps as the denominator and the claps as the numerator," she said. "It's exciting."

Balogh would like to see the program expanded, with classroom teachers learning the method through a scripted curriculum. So far, Cosgriff, the principal, has been able to maintain it in lower grades by pulling together funding from various state and local sources, but the money is running out, she said.

"We knew academic music was making a difference," she said.

Funding needed

The Academic Music program costs about $6.50 per student per month, but it's special-instruction money that Cosgriff doesn't have right now.

The principal hopes to raise funds in the community, reasoning that while music is a tough sell, higher math scores are not.

Third-grader Noemi Guevara already has the academic music sales pitch for her principal.

"They get to learn more. They get good grades," the 9-year-old said. "When you do it, it sounds like you're doing math, but you're playing music."

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. jtucker@sfchronicle.com