When the music's over. Does music skill transfer to children's and young adolescents' cognitive and academic skills? A meta-analysis
By Giovanni Sala, Fernand R. Gobet. 2017
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Music training has been recently claimed to enhance children and young adolescents' cognitive and academic skills. However, substantive research on transfer of skills suggests that far-transfer - i.e., the transfer of skills between two areas only loosely related to each other - occurs rarely. In this meta-analysis, we examined the available experimental evidence regarding the impact of music training on children and young adolescents' cognitive and academic skills. The results of the random-effects models showed (a) a small overall effect size (d¯=0.16); (b) slightly greater effect sizes with regard to intelligence (d¯=0.35) and memory-related outcomes (d¯=0.34); and (c) an inverse relation between the size of the effects and the methodological quality of the study design. These results suggest that music training does not reliably enhance children and young adolescents' cognitive or academic skills, and that previous positive findings were probably due to confounding variables.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Education, Music
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5549373510d4066e862cb75953630d54730e5ade
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Education
Citations in the corpus
- A population-level analysis of associations between school music participation and academic achievement. (2020, background): “The empirical situation is similarly mixed for music, specifically (for recent reviews see Benz, Sellaro, Hommel, & Colzato, 2016; Dumont, Syurina, Feron, & van Hooren, 2017; Sala & Gobet, 2017); the topic on which this study focuses.”
- Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis (2019, methodology): “…and brain-training programs, have been purposely designed to boost cognitive function, other training programs implement mentally challenging activities such as music, video games, and chess (for reviews, see Sala & Gobet, 2017a; Simons et al., 2016; Strobach & Karbach, 2016).”