Effects of Music Education for Children With Reading Difficulties
Recruitment status was Active, not recruiting
The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of music education over a period of five months (three times per week, one hour per day) on the improvement of reading skills (decoding, prosody and phonological awareness) in children (8-10 years) with reading difficulties from poor neighborhoods in the city of Sao Paulo. A second objective is to develop a theoretical model that may explain how acquired musical skills are correlated with the supposed changes in each of the covariates and outcomes in this study.
The study will be administered to 270 children with reading difficulties from 10 different schools (27 children per school). 135 children will have music lessons and 135 will not; therefore, 5 schools will be the control and 5 schools will be the intervention group. The analysis will consider the cluster structure, since the randomization was not conducted at the individual level (i.e., the school level was the randomization unit). For the inferential analysis, generalized estimation models and structural equation modeling will be used.
|Study Design:||Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single Blind (Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment
|Official Title:||Effects of Music Education on Domain of Reading and Cognitive Abilities in Children With Reading Difficulties: a Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial|
- Changes in Reading abilities [ Time Frame: Change from Baseline in each reading skills (prosody, non-word/ word reading and phonological awareness) at 5 months ] [ Designated as safety issue: Yes ]1)Phonological Awareness Test; 2)Reading Test (consisting of a total of 88 real words and 88 non-words). 3) Prosody will be assessed through WinPitch-Easy Prosody which is a program developed by the engineer and linguist Philippe Martin, University of Toronto, Canada, and the changes in following components will be evaluated:a) Analysis of the temporal prosodic aspects, b) configuration of F0 curve and c) setting curve (F0)
- Changes in Portuguese achievement [ Time Frame: Change from baseline (July, 2011) in the grades in Portuguese at 5 moths. This period, in Brazil corresponds the second scholar semester July -December ] [ Designated as safety issue: Yes ]It will be collected the grades in the Portuguese in the baseline (July) for all children participating in this study in order to study the progress or failure of the children in this scholar subject, being repeated this evaluation at beginning of December.
|Study Start Date:||March 2011|
|Estimated Study Completion Date:||December 2011|
|Primary Completion Date:||June 2011 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)|
Experimental: Music Education
Music education classes take place three times a week, 50 minutes each. These interventional classrooms will make available keyboard and blockflute.
Other: Music Education
The intervention - music classes - will be methodologically and educationally based on the National Curriculum Parameters that were developed in Brazilian in the 80s; the focus here is centered on a modern approach to music education where the traditional process of musical learning is not restricted to the domain of the musical reading (sheet music), but also includes musical improvisation, composition and interpretation. Children will be encouraged to create their own music; perception and identification of the elements of musical language in production activities will be explained to them by means of voice, body, sound materials and tools available. Song lyrics, rhymes and rap will be created using elements of musical language not focused purely on the "classical" elements/music.
Other Name: Music Education is an Educational intervention
No Intervention: Non-intervention
In this arm, children will be not encourage practicing musical activities and will not have musical classes.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01388881
|Federal University of São Paulo - Psychiatry Department|
|São Paulo, Brazil, 04038-030|
|Principal Investigator:||Jair Mari||Federal University of São Paulo|
|Study Director:||Hugo Cogo-Moreira||Federal University of São Paulo|