Why Kids Who Study Music Do Better in School

By ABC Academy of Music teaching team · Updated August 2026

“Music lessons help kids do better in school.” You have probably heard some version of that claim too. Parents ask us often: “Will music lessons actually help my child’s grades?” This is a companion piece to our article on music and brain development, which covered IQ and brain structure. This one covers something more specific: grades, test scores, and school skills. Some of the evidence here is strong. Some is weaker than the headlines suggest. We checked the original source for every claim below. See our full Music Education Research hub for every study behind our program.

The Big Canadian Study: 112,916 Students in British Columbia

The largest study on this topic comes from right here in Canada. Researchers published it in 2020, using real school records, not survey answers. The sample covered four groups of British Columbia public school students, grades 7 through 12. That is 112,916 students in total.

The team checked whether music participation linked to exam scores in math, science, and English. It did. Students in instrumental music, like band or orchestra, scored higher on all four exams than students who did not play. The gap was smaller for choir students.

Researchers measure the size of a gap with a number called an effect size. A small effect size sits below 0.2. A medium one sits near 0.5. Here is how band, orchestra, and choir compared:

Music activity	Effect size on exam scores	What that means
Instrumental (band, orchestra)	0.28 to 0.44	Small-to-medium gap
Choir (vocal music)	0.05 to 0.13	Close to no gap

This was not a sloppy study. The team controlled for a child’s family income, home language, and how well that same child had scored back in grade 7, before any music gap could show up. Controlling for earlier scores like this is one of the stronger things a study like this can do. It does not rule out every other cause. But it beats simply comparing music kids to non-music kids with no other checks.

A university press release about the study went further than the paper itself. It called music students “about one academic year ahead” of their peers. That framing did not come from the journal article. It came from the university’s own news release. The real effect sizes in the table above are worth taking seriously. But they describe a modest gap, not something as large and simple as an extra year of school. This is worth flagging directly. It is a clean example of a pattern from our companion piece on brain development: a careful study finds a modest result, and the press release rounds it 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 never claimed it did. This study only shows a link. Nobody randomly assigned students to take band or not. Students and families chose for themselves.

That choice is not random, and other research shows exactly how. A US study (2019) used a separate, national dataset to build a picture of high school music students. Band and orchestra students came, on average, from higher-income families with higher earlier grades, even before they enrolled. Choir students looked more like the average student.

A separate US study looked at why students choose to join, or drop out of, music electives in city schools. The models it built reliably told music students apart from non-music students. That means earlier grades 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 shows up. Kids who already do well in school, and kids from families with more money, are more likely to end up in band or orchestra. Researchers call this “niche-picking,” a term we used in our companion article on music and brain development. The students in these studies were never a random slice of all students. The BC study’s statistical checks reduce this problem. They cannot fully remove it; no study like this ever can. That is exactly why its own researchers called their findings a link, not proof of cause and effect.

The Older Studies: What the “Champions of Change” Era Actually Found

Before the BC study, the most-cited work on this question came from a large US research project at Harvard, in the late 1990s. It became known as the “Champions of Change” era of arts-education advocacy. Researchers there ran five separate reviews, combining dozens of studies from 1950 through 1998. Three reviews looked at link-only studies. Two looked at real experiments, where researchers assigned some students to arts training and others to a control group.

The link-only studies found what you would expect: arts students had higher verbal and math scores than non-arts students. The experiments told a different story. They found no real proof that arts study caused those gains. The researchers’ own title for the paper summed it up: “Mute Those Claims.”

Music got its own chapter in the same book. That researcher ran three separate reviews. One looked at students who chose music on their own: a modest positive link to math scores. One looked at real music-instruction experiments, teaching music and then testing math: a real effect, not just a link. One looked at playing background music during a math test itself: only a very small effect. Each review covered just five to twelve studies, so the author was blunt about the limits of calling any of it settled. That was true in 2000, and no single study since has fully settled it.

Focus, Memory, and Self-Control

One area of research looks less at grades and more at the mental skills underneath them: ignoring distractions, holding information in your head, and switching between tasks. Researchers group these skills together and call them “executive function.” They matter for almost every school subject.

A 2025 review pooled ten separate studies that trained one group of kids, ages three to six, in music, and compared them to a control group. Training linked to real gains in three areas: stopping an impulse, holding information in mind, and switching between tasks or rules. All three gaps were small to medium.

This is more encouraging than the broad “grades and test scores” research, for a specific reason. Many of these studies compared a trained group to an untrained group, rather than just comparing kids who already took lessons to kids who did not. That design handles the self-selection problem better than a simple comparison can. It still is not one huge, final trial. Ten studies is a real but modest base of evidence, and they varied in how they trained children and measured results.

One Randomized Study on the Hearing Brain

Our companion article on music and brain development covered research from a US lab, showing that music training changes how precisely the brain encodes sound. One study from that lab deserves a closer look here, for its unusual design and its link to reading-related skills, even though it did not measure reading itself.

In a US study (2014), researchers partnered with 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 simple comparison study. The team used a randomized, staggered design: one group started lessons right away and had two years of training by the end. The other group waited a year, then had one year of training by the same point. This let researchers compare more training to less training, without ever denying anyone lessons for good.

The team measured how precisely each child’s brain encoded speech sounds, using a brain-wave hearing test. Children with more training showed stronger, more precise sound encoding 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 or a grade. Precise sound encoding is seen as a building block for reading, in the wider research world. But this study did not test reading directly. Anyone who says this one study proves lessons raise reading scores is going further than the data supports.

What This All Adds Up To

Some things here rest on solid ground. The largest study available, covering over 112,000 British Columbia students, found a real, modest, checked link between music participation and exam scores in English, math, and science. A recent review of training studies found real, if modest, gains in memory and self-control. A randomized study found more training linked to more precise sound processing in the brain.

Other things stay genuinely uncertain. Every one of the large achievement studies only shows a link. Separate research confirms why that matters: students who end up in band and orchestra were already, on average, stronger students from better-off families, before they ever picked up an instrument. The most-cited older reviews found no experimental proof that arts study broadly causes gains in verbal or math scores. We could not verify a published US analysis directly linking national reading or math scores to music coursetaking, even though the US runs its own separate arts assessment. The same was true for a Canada-wide or Ontario-specific dataset. 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 settled fact. It is that several well-designed studies show specific, modest, mostly link-only ties between music and school measures, plus one small randomized study on brain sound processing. Bigger claims outrun the evidence we could check. See our companion piece on music and child brain development for the brain science behind these findings, and our article on music lessons and discipline for how these gains connect to focus and grit.

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, mostly link-only ties between music and school performance, plus one randomized study connecting training to how precisely a child’s brain processes sound. If you want your child to try real, structured instruction from trained teachers, in piano, guitar, voice, drums, or our Music Together® program, 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.