"Music Lessons Enhance
IQ" is the bold title of a forthcoming article by E. Glenn
Schellenberg. The article, due to appear in Psychological Science,
reports on a study carried out through the University of Toronto at
Mississauga.
In the study 144 six-year-olds
were randomly divided into four groups. Two of the groups received
music training - one Kodály voice lessons and the other
traditional keyboard lessons. The other two served as control groups,
one receiving drama lessons and one no lessons at all.
All the children were thoroughly
tested twice, first at the beginning and then again at the end of the
experiment (i.e., before and after the lessons). Children in all four
groups experienced significant increases in IQ, presumably due to the
fact that they had begun attending school during the course of the
experiment. However, the increase in IQ was higher for both music
groups than for either of the control groups. The average increase
for control group members was 4.3 points, while the average increase
for groups receiving musical instruction was 7.0 points.
The increase in IQ was higher for
both music groups than for either of the control groups.
The children were given three sets
of tests each time: the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children -
Third Edition (WISC-III), the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement
(K-TEA), and the Behavioral Assessment System for Children (BASC).
Administering this array of tests, each of which includes subsets,
allowed the researchers to examine not only overall increase in IQ,
but improvement in specific areas as well.
On the WISC-III, the music groups
showed greater improvement than the control groups for all for of the
index scores, Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Organization, Freedom
from Distractibility, and Processing Speed. They also outperformed
their peers on 10 of 12 subtests, Picture Completion, Coding,
Similarities, Picture Arrangement, Block Design, Vocabulary, Object
Assembly, Comprehension, Symbol Search, and Digit Span. The only
subtests that the control groups didn't do as well on were Arithmetic
and Information. The music groups did slightly better on each of the
five subtests of the K-TEA, Mathematical Applications, Reading
Decoding, Spelling, Reading Comprehension, and Mathematical
Computation. The drama group, however, showed greater improvements in
BASC subtests measuring adaptive behaviors.
The study concludes that "the
results provide evidence of relatively modest but widespread
intellectual benefits from taking music lessons." The study is
especially noteworthy because it goes to great lengths to rule out
other possible factors that could be responsible for the difference
in post-experiment IQs. All students were from a similar economic
background; all were the same age; all had a similar pre-experiment
IQ; and all were tested similarly. In addition, students were
assigned to their groups randomly and testers did not know which
groups students belonged to. It would be difficult to refute the
study's findings, which is good news indeed for music
educators.