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Essay On Mozart Effect

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The Mozart Effect, broadly stated, is the idea that music can help with many other aspects of a student’s education. Its research started decades ago and is still highly debated today, with some condition to the findings. However, in Bob Duke’s article, he explains why it doesn’t matter whether of not it helps tests scores. He believes we should not be using this as an excuse for keeping music programs because there are countless better reasons. Duke’s article highly reinforced why I personally believe music education is so important and why I can’t wait to be a part of it.
The Mozart Effect theory first started with research based on the effect of music on the brain. One of the first to test this was Gordon Shaw and his student Xiaodan …show more content…

The first study was done to replicate Shaw’s method by testing how music affected two spatial tasks. In this study, those who listened to Mozart had a higher average test score. As for the other study, they measured brain wave activity within college students two times, one time after they listened to a Mozart sonata and once after listening to no music. Lerch and Dr. Anderson stated that “The EEG recordings were somewhat correlated with the students ' performance, as increased brain activity was associated with an increase in spatial-reasoning performance after listening to the Mozart”.
After this research, the book “The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind and Unlock the Creative Spirt” was written by Don Campbell in 2002. According to Donna Lerch and Dr. Thomas Anderson of The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his book claimed that listening to the music of Mozart could raise your intelligence quotient.
As for Bob Duke’s article, he discussed why we shouldn’t base the whole reasoning for keeping music education on tests scores. Even if music may help raise tests scores or make students smarted, we should not be defending it in this way. Duke explains that if we continue to do this, we are basing the whole future of music education on test scores.
In both Duke and I’s opinions, there are so many other amazing reasons why we should continue music education, not just because it has the potential to make

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