The Mozart Effect

09/26/2011

The heart of anti-bias education is a vision of a world in which all children and families can become successful, contributing members of their society.
Louise Derman-Sparks, Debbie LeeKeenan and John Nimmo

In October 1993, Nature magazine published an article by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky about their study in which subjects who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata prior to taking IQ tests added 9 points to their IQ scores. This research spawned a veritable industry of Mozart products for infants and toddlers (even though the research was performed on college students). Most famous was the Disney Baby Einstein products.

According to The Invisible Gorilla And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010) even though dozens of subsequent tests repudiated this research, public fascination with the notion that playing classical music to babies would increase their IQs continued. Finally, in 2007 researchers at the University of Washington surveyed parents of infants and toddlers in Washington and Montana and found that for infants, each additional hour per day spent watching baby DVDs was associated with an 8 percent reduction in vocabulary, and for toddlers, there was no significant relationship between DVD viewing and vocabulary size.

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