What's new in pedagogy research?(music education)

Does studying and playing music make you smarter for the rest of your life? Does it make you smarter in a particular subject, like math? Those of us who are a bit challenged in the IQ department alternately hope it's so and fear it's not! A new study from Toronto has investigated this continuing question, and the results are interesting. (1)

This study consisted of two parts. The main goal of the first part was to test if the duration of children's music lessons was positively associated with IQ. The sample population was made up of 147 children who were between ages 6 and 11, who had a varied amount of private and group music lessons in their background. Detailed information indicated that the group was very diverse culturally, and the parents' education and income also varied widely. Data were collected for three main areas:

* Each child took the WISC-III, which is a widely accepted standardized test of childhood intelligence.

* Each child filled out the K-TEA, a standardized test for academic achievement, and the parents provided copies of the child's school report cards.

* Each parent completed the BASC, which contained 138 items describing their child's social adjustment.

The resulting scores were compared statistically, and the results indicated that the duration of music lessons did have a small but positive association with measures of intelligence. They influenced grades in school, but did not particularly influence any specific area such as math. Previous studies have not always taken into account the fact that children who take music lessons often come from well-educated parents with high IQs. Since IQ is strongly heredity, the parents' IQs, education and resulting social status could have been confounding variables in previous studies. In this study, however, a positive association to intelligence and academic achievement remained across the variables of income, parents' education and involvement in nonmusical out-off school activities.

The second part of the study explored whether these positive associations lasted after music lessons had ended. College freshmen were surveyed, and in this sample 56 percent had taken lessons for an average of 7.8 years, and had played music regularly for an average of 9.4 years, with the lessons generally being discontinued four years previously. As in the first part, the students were very diverse culturally, and their parents had a broad range of educational backgrounds and incomes. Each student was given an age-appropriate test of intelligence (WAIS-III), and each self-reported on their high school GPA for academic achievement. The statistical results of these comparisons indicated: