In the last issue of The World Ensemble, Adele Diamond’s article on the importance of developing Executive Function in Sistema programs prompted significant response. Here is further research that concludes that music education does indeed develop executive function (a crucial skill set for success in schooling). There have been an increasing number of research studies about the cognitive effects of music making. Longitudinal studies into the subtler functions are rare, however.
A research team from The Netherlands followed four groups of primary school students for two and a half years: two groups with a music intervention, one visual arts group, and one control group. They found, unsurprisingly, that children in the visual arts group performed better on visuospatial memory tasks compared to the three other groups. However, the test scores on inhibition, planning and verbal intelligence, often considered together as “executive function,” increased significantly in the two music groups over time compared to the visual art and no arts groups. Analysis shows a possible transfer effect from executive function to academic performance scores. Click here to access the full research.
Date Published: 12 August 2018