Please don't stop the music: A meta-analysis of the cognitive and academic benefits of instrumental musical training in childhood and adolescence
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
An extensive literature has investigated the impact of musical training on cognitive skills and academic achievement in children and adolescents. However, most of the studies have relied on cross-sectional designs, which makes it impossible to elucidate whether the observed differences are a consequence of the engagement in musical activities. Previous meta-analyses with longitudinal studies have also found inconsistent results, possibly due to their reliance on vague definitions of musical training. In addition, more evidence has appeared in recent years. The current meta-analysis investigates the impact of early programs that involve learning to play musical instruments on cognitive skills and academic achievement, as previous meta-analyses have not focused on this form of musical training. Following a systematic search, 34 independent samples of children and adolescents were included, with a total of 176 effect sizes and 5998 participants. All the studies had pre-post designs and, at least, one control group. Overall, we found a small but significant benefit (g‾Δ = 0.26) with short-term programs, regardless of whether they were randomized or not. In addition, a small advantage at baseline was observed in studies with self-selection (g‾pre = 0.28), indicating that participants who had the opportunity to select the activity consistently showed a slightly superior performance prior to the beginning of the intervention. Our findings support a nature and nurture approach to the relationship between instrumental training and cognitive skills. Nevertheless, evidence from well-conducted studies is still scarce and more studies are necessary to reach firmer conclusions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it