Impact Of Orff Music Therapy On Working Memory And Attention Of Children With Down's Syndrome

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of Orff music therapy on on working memory and attention of children with Down's Syndrome, to analyze possible causes of the effect, to further develop implementation process and method of Orff music therapy for children with Down's syndrome.The experimental design of the study was between-subjects and experimental before-after design. The sample included 22 Down's syndrome children from Grade 3 to 9 in several special schools. They were divided into three groups including music therapy group, language intervention group, and non-intervention group. Each group just received a treatment. There were a total of three interventions:Orff music therapy, language intervention and non-intervention. This experimental research divided three parts. The first part is to assess interventional before-after level of working memory of the subjects by Wechsler Intelligence Scale for School-aged Children in China (WISC-CR) and Corsispan Test. The second part is to assess interventional before-after level of subjects' attention by Attention Test for primary and secondary students in China. The third part is to evaluate the emotional changes of Down's syndrome children during intervention by recording the number of subjects'smile. The research compared the three-group subjects' interventional before-after level of working memory and attention in order to clarify different effects on children with Down syndrome caused by the three different interventions. Furthermore, a typical case was conducted to intensively study.The main results showed as follows:(1) Orff music therapy could significantly improve working memory of children with Down's syndrome.(2) Orff music therapy could significantly improve stability of attention of children with Down's syndrome.(3) Orff music therapy can promote positive emotions of children with Down's syndrome.(4) Case study also verified that Orff music therapy could improve working memory, stability of attention, positive emotion, and music comprehension of children with Down's syndrome. In conclusion, this research confirmed that Orff music therapy could improve the attention and working memory of children with Down's syndrome, the improvement is possibly due to the reasonable design of Orff music activities. According to the research intervention, the author proposed an implementation procedure of Orff music therapy for children with Down's syndrome to improve their attention and working memory.