“Music lessons help kids do better in school.” You have probably heard some version of that claim too. It shows up in parenting articles and school fundraising pitches alike. This article is a companion piece to our look at music and brain development, which covered IQ and brain structure. This one covers something more specific: grades, test scores, and school skills like reading, math, and self-control. The short version is that some of the evidence here is genuinely strong. Some of it is weaker than the headlines suggest. We checked the primary source for every claim below. For the full set of data behind our program decisions, see our full Music Education Research hub.
The Big Canadian Study: 112,916 Students in British Columbia
The single largest study on this topic comes from right here in Canada. In 2020, researchers Martin Guhn, Scott Emerson, and Peter Gouzouasis published a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology. They used real school records, not survey answers. Their sample covered four cohorts of British Columbia public school students, from grade 7 through grade 12: 112,916 students in total.
The researchers checked whether music participation was linked to exam scores in math, science, and English, four exams across those three subjects. It was linked. Students who took instrumental music, like band or orchestra, scored higher on all four exams than students who did not. The gap was smaller for students in vocal music, like choir.
Researchers measure the size of a gap using a number called an effect size. A small effect size sits below 0.2. A medium one sits near 0.5. In this study, instrumental music showed an effect size between 0.28 and 0.44, depending on the subject. That is a small-to-medium gap. Vocal music showed an effect size between 0.05 and 0.13. That is closer to no gap at all.
This was not a sloppy study. The researchers controlled for a child’s socioeconomic background, home language, and how well that same child had scored back in grade 7, before any music-training difference could show up. Controlling for prior scores like this is one of the stronger things a non-randomized study can do. It does not rule out every other explanation. But it is a meaningfully better design than simply comparing music kids to non-music kids with no other checks in place.
UBC’s own press release about the study went further than the paper itself did. It described continuing music students as “about one academic year ahead” of their peers. That framing did not come from the journal article. It came from the university’s news release summarizing it. The effect sizes actually reported in the paper, 0.28 to 0.44, are real and worth taking seriously. But they describe a modest gap, not something as large and simple-sounding as an extra year of school. This is worth flagging directly, because it is a clean example of a pattern we described in our brain development article: a careful study produces a modest finding, and the press release attached to it rounds that finding up.
Why Even a Study This Big Can’t Prove Cause and Effect
A sample of 112,916 students sounds like it should settle the question. It does not, and the researchers behind it never claimed it did. This is a correlational study. Nobody randomly assigned students to take band or not. Students and their families chose for themselves.
That choice is not random, and other research shows exactly how it is not random. A 2019 study by Kenneth Elpus and Carlos Abril used a separate, nationally representative U.S. dataset to build a demographic profile of high school music students. Band and orchestra students came disproportionately from higher-income families and had higher prior academic achievement than the overall student population, even before they enrolled. Choir students looked more like the general student body.
A separate study by Daryl Kinney looked at why individual students choose to enroll in, or drop out of, band, string, and choir electives in urban schools. His statistical models used a student’s prior academic achievement and socioeconomic status, along with other factors, to predict enrollment and persistence. Those models reliably told music students apart from non-music students, meaning prior achievement and family background were not evenly spread between the two groups to begin with.
Put these findings together with the BC study, and a clear pattern emerges. Kids who are already doing well in school, and kids from families with more resources, are more likely to end up in band or orchestra in the first place. Researchers call this pattern self-selection, or niche-picking, a term we used in our companion article on music and brain development. It means the students in these studies were never a random slice of all students to begin with. The Guhn study’s statistical controls reduce this problem. They cannot eliminate it completely, because no observational study can. This is exactly why the researchers described their own findings as relationships, not proof of cause and effect.
The Older Meta-Analyses: What the “Champions of Change” Era Actually Found
Before the BC study, the most cited body of work on this question came from a large research project at Harvard called Reviewing Education and the Arts Project, or REAP. Psychologists Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland led it in the late 1990s, publishing their results in a special 2000 issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, in a period sometimes referred to as the “Champions of Change” era of arts-education advocacy.
Winner and a co-author, Monica Cooper, ran five separate meta-analyses, combining dozens of individual studies published from 1950 through 1998. Three of those meta-analyses looked at correlational studies. Two looked at actual experiments, where researchers assigned some students to arts training and others to a control group. The correlational studies found what you would expect: students involved in the arts had higher verbal and math scores than students who were not. The experimental studies told a different story. They found no real evidence that arts study caused those gains in general verbal or math achievement. Winner and Cooper’s own title for the paper summed it up: “Mute Those Claims.”
Music specifically got its own chapter in the same volume, written by researcher Kathryn Vaughn. She ran three separate analyses. One looked at students who chose to study music on their own: a modest positive link to math scores. One looked at actual music-instruction experiments, where researchers taught music and then tested math: this one found a real effect, not just a correlation. One looked at playing background music during a math test itself: this found only a very small effect. Each analysis covered a handful of studies, five to twelve depending on the category, so Vaughn was blunt about the limits of calling any of it settled. That was true in 2000, and no single study since has fully resolved it.
Executive Function: Attention, Working Memory, and Self-Control
One area of research looks less at grades and more at the mental skills underneath them: things like ignoring distractions, holding information in your head, and switching between tasks. Researchers call this set of skills executive function, and it matters for almost every subject in school.
A 2025 review pooled the results of ten separate studies that trained one group of young children, ages three to six, in music and compared them to a control group. Music training was linked to real gains in three specific areas: inhibitory control, meaning the ability to stop an impulse; working memory, meaning the ability to hold information in mind; and cognitive flexibility, meaning the ability to switch between tasks or rules. All three gaps were small to medium in size, using the same effect-size scale described earlier.
This is a more encouraging body of evidence than the broad “grades and test scores” literature, for a specific reason. Many of the underlying studies compared a trained group to a group that received no training, rather than simply comparing kids who already happened to take lessons to kids who did not. That design handles the self-selection problem better than a purely observational study can. It still is not one massive, definitive trial. Ten studies is a real but modest evidence base, and the studies inside it varied in exactly how they trained children and how they measured the results.
One Randomized Study on the Auditory Brain (and What It Did Not Measure)
Our companion article on music and brain development covered research from Nina Kraus’s lab at Northwestern University, showing that music training changes how precisely the brain encodes sound. One study from that lab deserves a closer look here, because of its unusual design and its relevance to reading-related skills, even though it did not measure reading itself.
In 2014, Kraus and her colleagues partnered with Harmony Project, a nonprofit offering free music lessons to children in lower-income Los Angeles neighborhoods. Forty-four children, ages six to nine, took part. This was not a purely observational study. The researchers used a randomized, staggered design: one group started lessons right away and had two years of training by the end of the study. The other group waited a year before starting and had one year of training by the same point. This let the researchers compare children with more music training to children with less, without ever denying anyone lessons permanently.
The researchers measured how precisely each child’s brain encoded speech sounds, using a hearing test based on brain-wave recordings. Children with more music training under their belt showed stronger, more precise neural encoding of those sounds than children with less. It is worth being exact about what this study did, and did not, measure. It measured a brain-based hearing test, not a reading score, a grade, or a standardized test result. Precise sound encoding is considered a building block for reading in the broader research literature, but this particular study did not test reading directly. Anyone who tells you this one study proves music lessons raise reading scores is going further than the data supports.
What This All Adds Up To
Some things here rest on real, solid ground. The largest study available, covering more than 112,000 British Columbia students, found a real, modest, statistically controlled link between music participation and exam scores in English, math, and science. A recent review of training studies found real, if modest, gains in specific mental skills like working memory and self-control. A randomized study found that more music training was linked to more precise neural processing of sound.
Other things remain genuinely uncertain. Every one of the large achievement studies is correlational, and separate research confirms exactly why that matters: students who end up in band and orchestra were already, on average, stronger students from better-resourced families before they ever picked up an instrument. The most-cited older meta-analyses found no experimental evidence that arts study broadly causes gains in verbal or math achievement. We could not verify a published analysis directly linking NAEP reading or math scores to music coursetaking, in any source we could independently check, even though NAEP runs its own separate arts assessment. The same was true for a Canada-wide or Ontario-specific dataset connecting music participation to standardized test scores. The British Columbia study is the strongest Canadian data available, and it is provincial, not national.
The honest summary is not “music makes kids do better in school,” stated as a settled fact. It is that several well-designed, real studies show specific, modest, and mostly correlational links between music participation and academic measures, alongside one small randomized study showing a training effect on a brain measure tied to sound processing. Bigger claims than that outrun the evidence we could verify.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does taking music lessons guarantee better grades?
No study we reviewed shows a guarantee like that. The largest study, covering over 112,000 British Columbia students, found a real but modest statistical link between music participation and exam scores, after controlling for income, prior grades, and language background. That is evidence of a relationship, not proof that lessons alone will raise any individual child’s grades.
Is the British Columbia study proof that music lessons cause higher test scores?
Not on its own. It is a correlational study: no student was randomly assigned to take music. Other research shows why that matters here specifically. Separate studies found that students with higher prior grades and higher household income were more likely to enroll in band and orchestra in the first place. The BC study statistically controlled for some of this, which makes it stronger than many older studies, but it cannot fully rule out self-selection.
What does the research say about music and attention or self-control?
This is one of the more promising areas. A 2025 review of ten training studies found children ages three to six who received music training showed real, if modest, gains in inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility compared to children in a control group. These studies generally trained one group and compared it to another, which handles the self-selection problem better than simply comparing kids who already take lessons to kids who do not.
Does music training improve reading skills specifically?
The clearest evidence here is about brain processing, not reading scores directly. A 2014 randomized study found children who received more music training through a community program showed more precise neural encoding of speech sounds than children with less training. Precise sound encoding is considered a building block for reading in the broader research literature, but that particular study did not measure reading scores, grades, or any classroom outcome.
Music Lessons at ABC Academy of Music
We think the real research is more interesting, and more honest, than a slogan. It does not support “music lessons guarantee better grades” as a blanket promise. It does support several genuine, specific, mostly correlational links between music participation and school performance, plus one randomized study connecting music training to how precisely a child’s brain processes sound. If you want your child to experience real, structured music instruction from trained teachers, browse our class schedule to find the right age group and instrument. Visit our rates and payment page for current pricing, or contact us with any questions about getting started at one of our Toronto-area studios.
SOURCES:
- Guhn, M., Emerson, S.D., and Gouzouasis, P., “A Population-Level Analysis of Associations Between School Music Participation and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 112, no. 2, 2020, pp. 308-328, https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000376
- University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine, “Music Students Perform Better in School Than Non-Musical Peers,” UBC News, April 24, 2020, https://www.med.ubc.ca/news/music-students-perform-better-in-school-than-non-musical-peers/
- Elpus, K., and Abril, C.R., “Who Enrolls in High School Music? A National Profile of U.S. Students, 2009-2013,” Journal of Research in Music Education, vol. 67, no. 3, 2019, pp. 323-338, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429419862837
- Kinney, D.W., “Selected Nonmusic Predictors of Urban Students’ Decisions to Enroll and Persist in Middle and High School Music Ensemble Electives,” Journal of Research in Music Education, vol. 67, no. 1, 2019, pp. 23-44, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429418809972
- Winner, E., and Cooper, M., “Mute Those Claims: No Evidence (Yet) for a Causal Link Between Arts Study and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 34, no. 3/4, 2000, pp. 11-75, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333637
- Vaughn, K., “Music and Mathematics: Modest Support for the Oft-Claimed Relationship,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 34, no. 3/4, 2000, pp. 149-166, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333641
- Lu, Y., Shi, L., and Musib, A.F., “Effects of Music Training on Executive Functions in Preschool Children Aged 3-6 Years: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, 2025, article 1522962, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1522962
- Kraus, N., Slater, J., Thompson, E.C., Hornickel, J., Strait, D.L., Nicol, T., and White-Schwoch, T., “Music Enrichment Programs Improve the Neural Encoding of Speech in At-Risk Children,” Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 34, no. 36, 2014, pp. 11913-11918, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1881-14.2014
- National Center for Education Statistics, “Three Key Findings from the 2016 Arts Assessment,” The Nation’s Report Card, https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/blog/blogpost_2016_arts.aspx