The Effects of Music and Movement Opportunity on the Analogical Reasoning Performance of African American and White School Children: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

This study sought tofurther establish that contextualfactors informed by cultural experiences could influence performance on a learning task. Low-income African American and middle-income White children listened to stories read under two contexts thatdiffered in the degree to which movement and music were integrated with the presentation of the stories. The high-movement expressive (HME) context allowedfor children to coordinate movement with a musical accompaniment while listening to the stories, and the low-movement expressive (LME) context allowed for little movement opportunity and no music was played. Performance was measured via a multiple-choice test designed to assess the amount of information the children processed about the stories. Results revealed that whereas African American children perform better under the HME than the LME context, White children perform better under the LME than the HME context. The results are discussed in relation to future research.