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MIND GAMES

MIND GAMES

Tech Execs Back Program They Say Boosts Math Scores

By ANDREW SIMONS





Each day at Santa Ana’s Madison Elementary School, Denise Esparza’s second graders gather at a row of flashy iMac computers, headphones atop their heads, to watch a cartoon penguin jump across their screens.

The penguin, replete with crossed eyes, stubby wings and a signature waddle, hardly seems the target of hefty donations from bigwigs such as Broadcom Corp.’s Henry Samueli, Emulex Corp.’s Paul Folino and FileNET Corp. founder Ted Smith.

But it is,to the tune of $1.5 million. In the past year, the three technology executives gave the money to a nonprofit group started by Gordon Shaw, a retired University of California, Irvine, physicist who produces software featuring the penguin, affectionately named JiJi.

The penguin helps students through basic mind problems designed to stimulate what’s known as a child’s “spatial-temporal reasoning”,or the ability to think in time and space.

The training is the heart of Shaw’s Irvine-based Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute, or Mind Institute for short. The program, which also includes music training on keyboards, purports to help kids develop subconscious skills needed to excel at math.

The best part, say teachers and school officials, is students don’t even know they’re learning math, a scary subject for many kids. Students see the software and music as more of a game than a lesson, they say.

“It’s an amazing program,” Esparza said.

Some kids at the mostly Hispanic school even hang around after school to work through problems using the software, she said.

That’s the kind of anecdotal evidence that has caught the attention of the Mind Institute’s major donors. Smith, already a large donor to UCI, heard about the program through the university’s Chief Executive Roundtable.

“It seemed interesting enough to me that I wanted more details,” Smith said. “I really wanted to drill down and see what people were talking about.”

So Smith said he visited Madison Elementary.

“I saw the enthusiasm in these kids. They really seemed to enjoy it,” he said.

Smith and other donors say that if kids do better at math, they’re more likely to join the ranks of tech companies like FileNET.

Backers say the program has something to do with testing gains at Madison Elementary. According to state data, 48% of second graders at the school scored in the top half nationally on the Stanford 9, a standardized achievement test. That was up from 40% the year before,the first year Madison had the program.

Smith was so impressed he hosted a gathering at his Laguna Beach home last year to introduce OC community leaders to Shaw.

Broadcom’s Samueli was among the attendees. He’s given nearly $500,000 to the Mind Institute through his foundation. Samueli’s daughter also takes part in the program at her school and is a big proponent of the institute’s software.

“There’s something missing in education,” Samueli said. “Kids aren’t pursuing careers in science, and that’s a problem we’re trying to solve. And I’d just like to hire more people locally. It’s an innovative approach.”

The work behind the institute started almost 15 years ago when Shaw was looking at whether early music training would help a child’s spatial-temporal reasoning later in life. Shaw’s premise: if the brain is stimulated right, reasoning ability improves.

Shaw, along with University of Wisconsin scientist Francis Rauscher, ran a small test to prove to doubters that music could help someone’s reasoning ability.

Shaw and Rauscher made 36 UCI undergraduates sit in silence before taking a reasoning test. Then he let them listen to 10 minutes of Mozart before taking a different test. The students did better the second time around.

Rauscher and Shaw wrote about their admittedly small-scale experiment in an article for British journal Nature.

The mass media bit. “Mozart makes you smarter,” Newsweek wrote, citing Shaw’s research. Self-help gurus, including Don Campbell in his 1997 book “The Mozart Effect,” started telling parents how to make their kids smarter by playing Mozart.

The hoopla prompted Shaw to pen his own book, “Keeping Mozart in Mind.” It included some cautionary notes.

“The idea that you should exploit something like this is wrong,” he said.

That didn’t stop the fever. In the late ’90s, Georgia officials started giving Mozart cassettes and CDs to the parents of newborns. A bill in Florida would have mandated that all childcare and education programs receiving state funding play a half hour’s worth of classical music a day for kids five and under.

But some skeptics weren’t swayed by the hype. None of Shaw’s evidence definitively concludes that listening to Mozart makes you smarter, according to some scientists.

Repeated studies of the Mozart effect weren’t able to reproduce the effects first described in Shaw’s 1993 article, said Dr. Kenneth Steele of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., one of Shaw’s most vocal critics.

Steele said he tried to replicate the tests of Shaw and Rauscher but couldn’t “discover what ingredient was causing (their) bread to rise while everybody else’s fell flat.”

Shaw and Rauscher contend that follow-on tests including Steele’s hadn’t measured the specific reasoning ability,the spatial temporal reasoning,that they originally sought to test.

“Because some people cannot get bread to rise does not negate the existence of a ‘yeast effect,'” they said.

The program has other critics, including some inside the Orange County Department of Education.

The program is looking to take in more kids even though it still doesn’t have a lot of data behind it, said one department source who asked not to be named.

Critics say that while Stanford 9 math scores are up at Madison Elementary, they’re also up statewide. Possible reasons could include simply more emphasis on math and test results.

The institute’s program has 4,100 students in 30 schools in OC, Los Angles, Oklahoma and New York. Sources say other schools have passed on the program for various reasons. One sticking point: it takes kids away from time spent on traditional teaching methods.

Then there’s the usual grumbling about private-sector backed education initiatives, including that major business donors who are used to getting results quickly are driving the program too fast.

That’s not an opinion shared by William Habermehl, superintendent of the OC Education Department.

“It’s an outstanding program that integrates mathematics and the arts,” he said. “That’s a wonderful combination and it saves time for teachers.”

The institute recently tapped Andrew Coulson,a former executive for the Samueli Foundation and a good friend of both Samueli and Broadcom Chief Executive Henry Nicholas,to help bring the program to more schools.

Samueli and Nicholas earlier tapped Coulson to head the now defunct Bluetorch Media, an online extreme sports network.

Meanwhile, Smith said he is actively courting more donors.

“In my mind’s eye, I see half a million kids in the program,” he said. “I’m convinced of this organization.”

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