Musiikin opiskelun siirtovaikutuksia : katsaus empiirisiin tutkimuksiin

Abstract

The impact of music education on nonmusical abilities has been assumed for many years, bur empirical evidence from systematically conducted studies is scarce and scattered. This is the first review in Finnish of empirical studies examining the transfer effects of music education. The studies included in this review concern the transfer effects of music to common school subjects and cognitive abilities: mathematics, language, social skills and memory. The participants of the included studies were children who either studied music at school or had music as their out-of-school hobby. Studies concerning the impact of music listening or professional musicians were omitted. True experiments are rare in comparison to correlational studies of the transfer effects. For this reason, the results of the studies cannot be summarized as clearly and favourably as the popular press and media have suggested. Advocates of music education have been keen to disseminate the results of empirical studies bur only when the studies have been able to prove the positive impact of music education. Due to the weak, and both positive and negative results of the studies on the effect of music education, systematic methods should be further developed. For example, joy, the essence of making music together, has not yet been measured in studies of the transfer effect.