The correlation between music aptitude and mathematical achievements of students - a case study of six individual students from a High School in Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

A gap existed in the literature focusing on research overall between music aptitude and mathematical achievement within a South African context. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of music aptitude on mathematical achievement and to evaluate the most appropriate instruments for measuring musical talents and juxtaposing them with mathematical achievement using Gordon's AMMA tool to establish the connection between musical acumen and mathematical achievement in randomly selected learners. This study presented data that is now available for use by other researchers. The researcher used exploratory designs to generalise, assess, and test qualitative exploratory results, and to see if they could be generalised to a sample and a population as outlined in this dissertation. This research was evaluated in both qualitative and quantitative phases. The researcher focussed on how students of different ages, gender, intelligence levels, and musical abilities reacted to the AMMA (music aptitude test). The gathered information confirmed what students achieved in the different elements of music such as pitch and rhythm making this study valuable for music educators. The findings revealed that the music aptitude test impacted the mathematical achievement of all the students in Grades 8 and 9 in a High School in Benoni, Johannesburg. This confirmed the hypothesis, that music aptitude impacted their mathematical achievement, and contributed to their educational performance despite their socioeconomic backgrounds, gender, age, and race. In South Africa, most students obtained excellent results in mathematics, and played at least one iii instrument proficiently. The new literature available on whether one impacted the other, and what implications it would have on their education was underpinned in this study which also identified existence of these connections, using the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA) test, which confirmed that a close relationship existed between music and mathematical achievement. The study used mixed research methods to answer the research questions and enlighten prospective researchers, and show their connections, associations, and relations.