Laura Lewis Brown The Benefits Of Musical Education

In “The Benefits of Musical Education,” Laura Lewis Brown provides an intriguing amount of research information on how musical education improves cognitive development of children. Brown explains how music is much more than just a simple note or lyric. She finds through her research that when children are involved in musical education there are important skills that are utilized on a multi-task level such as: listening, talking, visualizing, and mental processing (Brown). These are key components to learning and growing through all subjects and everyday life (Brown). Brown then provides research that consists of studies on the brain and how music education increases language development, information recollection, and thought processing. These studies lead to evidence of increased IQ, a harder working brain, and improved test scores. While analyzing Brown’s article, one can find: strong structure, sufficient elaboration on the topic, and research information to support the benefits of musical education.

Although Brown’s article is clearly researched based, her knowledge on the benefits of musical education should have been more evident. She overly described who the research was coming from. For example, “A music-rich experience for children of singing, listening and moving is really bringing a very serious benefit to children as they progress into more formal learning,” says Mary Luehrisen, executive director of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Foundation, a not-for-profit association that promotes the benefits of making music” (qtd. in Brown). Brown can fix this by including an annotated bibliography in her article to provide background information and a description on her