August 10, 2010, Updated September 13, 2012

The first-ever study of hand-clapping songs reveals a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults.

 

Dr-Idit-Solkin

Hand-clapping games lead to neater handwriting and fewer spelling mistakes, according to Israel’s Dr. Idit Sulkin.

Would you take up an activity, or encourage your children to engage in it, if you knew that it could reduce the risk of dyslexia and dyscalculia, improve cognitive abilities, social integration, handwriting and spelling and make you feel more focused and less tense?

Apparently all of the above is as easy as clapping your hands.

A researcher at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.

“We found that children in the first, second and third grades who sing these songs demonstrate skills absent in children who don’t take part in similar activities,” explains Dr. Idit Sulkin a member of BGU’s Music Science Lab in the department of the arts. “We also found that children who spontaneously perform hand-clapping songs in the yard during recess have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling errors.”

Dr. Warren Brodsky, the music psychologist who supervised her doctoral dissertation, says Sulkin’s findings lead to the presumption that “children who don’t participate in such games may be more at risk for developmental learning problems like dyslexia and dyscalculia. There’s no doubt such activities train the brain and influence development in other areas. The children’s teachers also believe that social integration is better for these children than those who don’t take part in these songs.”

Hand clapping improves motor and cognitive training

As part of the study, Sulkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in either a music appreciation program sanctioned by the board of education or hand-clapping songs training – each lasting a period of 10 weeks.

“Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn’t taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did,” Sulkin says. But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.

During the study, “Impact of Hand-Clapping Songs on Cognitive and Motor Tasks,” Sulkin interviewed school and kindergarten teachers, visited their classrooms and joined the children in singing. Her original goal, as part of her thesis, was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these pastimes are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sports.

“This fact explains a developmental process the children are going through,” Sulkin observes. “The hand-clapping songs appear naturally in children’s lives around the age of seven, and disappear around the age of 10. In this narrow window, these activities serve as a developmental platform to enhance children’s needs – emotional, sociological, physiological and cognitive. It’s a transition stage that leads them to the next phases of growing up.”

Improving spatial task performance

Sulkin says that no in-depth, long-term study has been conducted on the effects that hand-clapping songs have on children’s motor and cognitive skills. However, the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively, prompting countless parents to obtain a Baby Mozart CD for their toddlers.

Nevertheless, the BGU study demonstrates that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart music (known as the ‘Mozart Effect’) does not improve spatial task performance compared to 10 minutes of hand-clapping songs training or 10 minutes of exposure to silence.

Sulkin also discovered that hand-clapping song activity has a positive effect on adults as well. University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games they became more focused and less tense. “These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke,” she says. “But once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood.”

Sulkin grew up in a musical home. Her father, Dr. Adi Sulkin, is a well-known music educator who, in the 1970s and 1980s, recorded and published over 50 cassettes and videos of Israeli children’s play-songs, street-songs, holiday and seasonal songs, and singing games targeting academic skills.

“So quite apart from the research experience, working on this was like a second childhood,” she concludes.

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