What Works Clearinghouse Quick Review: 'Academic Music: Music Instruction to Engage Third-Grade Students in Learning Basic Fraction Concepts'

The study examined the effectiveness of an intervention designed to teach mathematical concepts through music. Specifically, it investigated the effect of the intervention on third-grade students' understanding of fractions. Sixty-seven students from one northern California elementary school participated in the study over a period of six weeks; of those, about half received both music instruction and mathematics instruction, while the other half received regular mathematics instruction. The study reported that students in the music intervention had greater understanding of fraction computation, but not fraction concepts, than students who did not receive the music intervention. The results reported in the paper are based on an analysis that "does not meet WWC (What Works Clearinghouse) evidence standards" because a required statistical adjustment for initial differences between the students who received the music intervention and those who did not was not included. The authors described an additional analysis which may have included the statistical adjustment, but the results of that analysis were not presented in the paper. A more thorough review (forthcoming) will examine whether this analysis may "meet WWC evidence standards with reservations." [The following study is reviewed in this What Works Clearinghouse Quick Review: Courey, S. J., Balough, E., Siker, J. R., & Paik, J. (2012). "Academic music: Music instruction to engage third-grade students in learning basic fraction concepts." "Educational Studies in Mathematics," 1-28. doi:10.1007/s10649-012-9395-9.]