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Learning music really does make students smarter, new study shows

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Close-up of hands playing a violin with tape markings on the fingerboard.

A music educator set out to bust the myth that music makes kids smarter but was stunned by his own findings.

Martin J. Bergee from the University of Kansas studied 1000 middle-school aged students to see if there was any link between music education and increased performance in other disciplines like maths and reading. Bergee believed that if he corrected his results for demographic and environmental influences like race, income, and education the much-vaunted link between music and broader academic performance would evaporate.

After painstakingly controlling for demographic factors, Bergee and his co-author Kevin M. Weingarten were surprised to find that learning music did appear to make students better mathematicians and readers. Their findings have been published in the Journal of Research in Music Education.

“There has been this notion for a long time,” Bergee said, “that not only are these areas related, but there's a cause-and-effect relationship — that as you get better in one area, you will, per se, get better in another area. The more you study music, the better you're going to be at math or reading. That's always been suspect with me.

"I've always believed that the relationship is correlational and not causational. I set out to demonstrate that there are probably a number of background variables that are influencing achievement in any academic area -- in particular, things like the educational level of the family, where the student lives, whether they are white or non-white, and so forth.

"My intention was to show that the relationships are probably spurious, meaning that background influences are the main drivers of the relationships, and once those outside influences, like demographics, etc., are controlled for, the relationship essentially disappears.

"But hang on. Much to my surprise, not only did they not disappear, but the relationships are really strong."

Does music really make kids smarter?

The link between music education and broader academic performance has recently been brought into question by research comparing the results of vast numbers of published studies. The academic advantage provided by music is less evident when students are randomly assigned to groups learning music and others learning another activity like dance or sport.

Bergee doesn’t say that music is a magic ticket to a better mind, but that it might develop generalisable learning processes. “Based on the findings, the point we tried to make is that there might be, and probably are, general learning processes that underlie all academic achievement, no matter what the area is,” Bergee said. “Music achievement, math achievement, reading achievement – there are probably more generalized processes of the mind that are brought to bear on any of those areas.

According to music researcher and educator Anita Collins, Bergee’s research is a particularly thorough attempt to untangle the effects of music education from broader social and demographic factors.

“In education you have to control for so many factors. It’s not clear-cut and it shouldn’t be. We’re developing human beings. Human beings are some of the most complex things on the planet.”

Collins sees Bergee’s study as supporting a wholistic approach to education. “[Music education] should be viewed as a vital part of a larger view of education where lots of different experiences will assist. It’s about the education of the whole child. And music, from this research, seems to be part of that.”

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