When the music's over. Does music skill transfer to children's and young adolescents' cognitive and academic skills? A meta-analysis

- Music training is thought to improve youngsters' cognitive and academic skills.
- Results show a small overall effect size (d¯ = 0.16, K = 118).
- Music training seems to moderately enhance youngsters' intelligence and memory.
- The design quality of the studies is negatively related to the size of the effects.
- Future studies should include random assignment and active control groups.

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.