Relative age effect in formal musical training
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Access to musical training depends on various factors, such as socioeconomic status and musical background of families, and the child's interest in learning music (related to their openness to experience). In the present study, we show an additional source of selection bias that has gone unnoticed: the relative age of children within the same cohort, when a selection process is implemented. The consequences of this grouping are known as the relative age effect, ranging from academic outcomes to self-esteem. In youth sports, there has been observed an overrepresentation of athletes born in the two first quarters compared to those born later. This study shows a similar unbalance across Spanish music conservatory courses in two samples: a Primary Sample of participants assessed by our research group ( N = 322; 33 % of children born in the first quarter vs. 21 % in the fourth quarter, V = .12) and a Secondary Sample comprised by the complete census of six conservatories in Spain ( N = 2182; 27 % vs. 24 %, V = .04). This bias was larger when computed on those participants selecting the most popular instrument. In our sample, the relative age of the children and adolescents was independent of other sources of selection bias, such as socioeconomic status. Moreover, the relative age effect was stable across conservatory courses, pointing to an enrolment bias and the impact of a lack of adjustment in the conservatory entrance exam.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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