Music lessons may give a boost to the IQ scores of children, even if they're less than musical prodigies. A study of six-year-olds found that those who took music lessons for one year gained more points on IQ tests as compared to their peers not involved in music classes. The benefit was small, but was seen across the spectrum of abilities measured in the tests, including math, language and spatial skills. Research has long suggested an association between intelligence and involvement in music, but whether music lessons actually push IQ upward has been unclear. It could be that children with higher IQs may be more likely to take music lessons because more-educated, higher-income parents can provide them. Researchers from the University of Toronto at Mississauga in Canada followed 144 children who were randomly assigned to take either music lessons - keyboard or singing, drama lessons, or no extracurricular classes. The children took standard tests of IQ at the beginning and end of the year, and parents completed a survey on their children's behaviour. After a year of singing and keyboard lessons, children in the music groups showed a bigger gain in IQ points than the others did. On average, it was found that children who took music lessons gained seven IQ points while those in the other two groups gained about four. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there's something about learning music, in particular, that does an IQ good. Doing extracurricular activities like learning chess, or taking part in a science programme, might show the same effect on IQ scores. This may not be true of all extracurricular activities, however, since drama lessons did not show an IQ benefit in this study. On the other hand, the study did find that, unlike children in the other groups, those in the drama group showed improvement in their social skills. The lesson from these findings suggests that getting kids away from the TV and involving them in activities that interest them is bound to reap benefits.
Psychological Science,
August 2004
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