Impact of music education on student performance

Abstract

It is claimed that music may have many benefits on students, but few empirical analyses have examined the effect that music can have on the academic outcomes of these students. This paper analyzes the impact music education has on the academic outcomes of students, using a subset of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. To try and obtain the exact effect of music education, my paper uses OLS regression, an internal instruments estimation, and the addition of a lagged dependent variable, all while bootstrapping the standard errors. These same techniques are then performed again, adding in a critical age, examining if the age at which a child begins the music education is significant. The results are positive and significant correlations for all measurements, except when including critical age and examining the effect on mathematics outcomes.