[originaltext] Most schools offer music and art classes to give students a w

Most schools offer music and art classes to give students a well-rounded education. New research indicates those classes may do more for students than just give them an appreciation of the arts. According to a study in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature, studying music and art can significantly advance a child’s reading skills and especially boost math proficiency. A class of six-year-old getting a special music lesson, part of a special arts program that researcher Martin Gardiner and his colleagues at the music school in Rhode Island designed for several elementary schools in the state.
    They started out wanting to see the impact of arts training in some first- and second-grade kids. So, some classrooms had an extra hour of this special arts curriculum incorporated into their normal school week, and other classrooms getting the standard curriculum in the arts, which was pretty standard for Rhode Island and rather representative of the country as a whole. The standard curriculum, say the researchers, gave students music lessons twice a month and art lessons twice a month. The typical music lesson tended to be somewhat passive. Students listened to tapes and concerts and talked about music in class. In contrast, the special arts classes met twice weekly and got students actively involved as a way to teach them the basic building blocks.
    The kinds of skill that they are learning in these grades are... in music, they’re learning to sing together properly, sing together on pitch, sing together in rhythm: and, in the visual arts, they’re learning to draw shapes and deal with colors and forms, and so forth. It is a very interactive, experiential approach that took advantage of children’s natural inclination to master enjoyable tasks and build upon sequential skills. And at the end of seven months, all the kids in the school took standardized tests, and we looked not only at how these teachers rated the kids on attitude and so forth, but also how the kids scored on their tests. And here’s what the researchers found. First of all, those kids who’d entered the first grade toward the bottom of the class in reading and then received the special arts program for the year had now caught up to the average in reading. And that in itself is wonderful. But in addition, they were now dramatically ahead in math compared to the kids who had not received the special arts classes throughout the year. The researchers found also that the kids who continued their special arts classes for a second year continued to improve in math.
16. What does the new research indicate about music and art classes?
17. What do we learn about the standard curriculum?
18. What’s the advantage of kids with special arts classes?