Music and math

By: Josh Leach

Why should students receive music education?  This question is quite valid; after all, on the surface understanding of music theory does not present any practical applications for students not pursuing a career in the musical arts.  However, numerous studies have supported a correlation between music education and heightened intelligence and improved academic performance.
Glenn Schellenberg, PhD, led a research team to find if music improves a child’s IQ scores.   The team’s results were published in the Journal of Educational Psychology .   A summary of this study was reported by PsychNet, a website which gives the public access to recent research findings.  The summary stated, “In Study 1 (N = 147), duration of music lessons was correlated positively with IQ and with academic ability among 6- to 11-year-olds, even when potential confounding variables (i.e., family income, parents' education, involvement in nonmusical activities) were held constant. In Study 2 (N = 150), similar but weaker associations between playing music in childhood and intellectual functioning were evident among undergraduates. In both studies, there was no evidence that musical involvement had stronger associations with some aspects of cognitive ability (e.g., mathematical, spatial-temporal, verbal) than with others. These results indicate that formal exposure to music in childhood is associated positively with IQ and with academic performance and that such associations are small but general and long lasting.”
The American Psychological Association commented on Schellenberg’s summary, saying, “The recent study builds on work he published in 2004, in which 6-year-olds given a year of voice or piano lessons saw a significantly larger increase in IQ than a control group that waited a year for musical instruction.  In the recent work, Schellenberg and his fellow researchers studied two groups of students: children 6 to 11 years old and college freshmen.  The younger group received an IQ test, an evaluation of their school grades and a measure of academic achievement. More than half of the group had taken music lessons, either in private or group instruction.”
The findings of the study are supported by several surveys and statistical analysis.  Wetter Koerner, a writer for Instructional Science: An International Journal of the Learning Science, said, “Statistical analysis comparing grades showed that children involved in music had significantly higher average grades than children in the control group. Moreover, the music group had significantly higher average grades in all individual subjects except sports.”  Abby Aldridge, a senior in the Seckman band program, said, “Absolutely, music makes you smarter.”  Her brother, Mike Aldridge, a junior at Seckman, said, “I think music helps coordinate the brain’s activities and make it work better.  That’s probably why music improves performance in school.”
Recently, many schools have cut their music departments due to substantial budget cuts.  If this correlation between music and intellectual success is true, then these students are losing out on these benefits.