Sing to learn
One of the first educational milestones for an American child is singing the ABCs by herself. It's a silly little tune [RealAudio], and once the child has mastered it, the innate love of repetition leads the kid to sing the song over and over and over and over... and over... again. There's a particular joy any parent or teacher will tell you about when the child masters the running together of the letters "L-M-N-O-P". The memorization of childhood songs and their attendant melodies is important in socialization, and is quickly followed by a lifelong pattern of learning of lyrics and melodies to hundreds of songs. We often astonish ourselves to realize we are singing the words to a song on the radio which we may not have heard for 25 years.
This aspect of memory is fascinating to me and leads me to wonder why song isn't used more often in adult learning. At least one high-profile project has demonstrated some success in marrying educational content with musical enjoyment: Schoolhouse Rock. There are tens of thousands of Americans who grew up in the 70s who, like me, can probably sing you the words to the Preamble to the American Constitution, or examples of grammatical conjunctions or the multiplication tables. Through a series of Emmy-award-winning 3-minute songs with animation, ABC kept kids' attention focused on things other than superhero cartoons and sugared-cereal commercials every Saturday morning from 1973-1985.
Unfortunately, singing in class is very uncool for American teenagers and adults. If you're not in a band or performing on stage with a cultural organization or in a church or community choir, there are very few places where Americans sing out loud. Unlike in Japan, karaoke has never really caught on here for adults. Another Japanese custom which never made it here -- and which is just now making a small comeback in Japan -- is the company song. When I was in college, I had -- for a very short time -- a job selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door. One of the team-building exercises our trainers used was the singing of the company song -- it was every bit as anemic a performance as you might imagine.
Unfortunately, from a quick search through some abstracts and journal articles available on Google Scholar, I wasn't able to confirm the seeming efficacy of song as a means of learning rote material. (And as much as we in the training and education fields hate to admit it, there is still much use for rote learning.) An abstract of David W. Rainey & Janet D. Larsen's article entitled "The Effect of Familiar Melodies on Initial Learning and Long-term Memory for Unconnected Text" from Music Perception reports on a study where learners were asked to memorize a list of names that were either spoken or sung to a familiar tune. The researchers observed how many trials it took the learners to memorize the names in using the different methods and how long to re-learn the names a week later. "In both studies, there was no advantage in initial learning for those who learned the names to the musical accompaniment. However,in both studies, participants who heard the sung version required fewer trials to relearn the list of names a week later than did participants who heard the spoken version."
Another study, by Mei-Ling Shen, entitled "Effects of Familiarity, Language, and Listener Age on Memory for Song Words and Melodies" in the journal Texas Music Education Research describes a study where groups of adults and grade-school children listened to renditions of 2 American folk songs and 2 Chinese folk songs in the original version and then in several different variations, and asked whether the variations were "the same", "somewhat the same" or "different." The results indicated that -- surprisingly to me -- adults were able to match the English songs fairly accurately, but the children were only one-third as accurate as the adults. On the Chinese songs, neither group was substantially accurate.
There is a great deal more research that I didn't read or couldn't find on Google, or didn't have access to, but it doesn't seem as slam-dunk a proposition as intuition would make it. Still, there are some educators who use songs in their educational designs with anecdotal reports of success. Dr. Carl K. Winter of UC Davis specializes in "[t]oxicological consequences of pesticide residues and other contaminants in foods, including risk assessment; regulation and public policy of pesticide residues and contaminants; naturally-occurring food toxins; bio-analytical toxicology." However, he is best known for his "Food Safety Music", hilarious parodies of popular songs on food safety education. His parodies, such as "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters" [RealAudio] (Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover") and "Food Irradiation" [RealAudio] (Little Eva's "Locomotion") entertain as well as instruct.
Similarly, Dr. Helen Davies, academic coordinator of the Microbiology Dept. at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, also creates song parodies such as "Leprosy" (the Beatles' "Yesterday") and "Herpes Simplex 1 and 2" (Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence"). Dr. Davies claims:
"Over the years I've had people tell me that what they remember is primarily the information that comes together with music," she says.
"It's what used to be called right brain/left brain work," Dr. Davies says. The right brain is used to remember, by way of music and rhyme, the things the left brain needs to put together, she explains.
Dr. Davies' students do better on national exams in microbiology and infectious diseases than do students in other fields, she says. While she praises the exceptional ability of her students, she takes some credit.
It does seem to work, and the students love it.... "It may be due to the music," Dr. Davies says. "There is a measure of enjoyment in it. So it's not only being able to study, but being able to study with fun."
And that "fun" may be the key which is not going to be discovered in an academic study, yet which may give us song as a useful tool in our training toolkit.
