

My intention was to was to show that the relationships are probably spurious, meaning that background influences are the main drivers of the relationships, and once those outside influences, like demographics, etc., are controlled for, the relationship essentially disappears.

"Those variables are in the article, and there are about lots of them. I set out to demonstrate that there are probably a number of background variables that are influencing achievement in any academic area - in particular, things like the educational level of the family, where the student lives, whether they are white or non-white, and so forth.

"I've always believed that the relationship is correlational and not causational. The more you study music, the better you're going to be at math or reading. "There has been this notion for a long time," Bergee said recently, "that not only are these areas related, but there's a cause-and-effect relationship - that as you get better in one area, you will, per se, get better in another area. And in his conclusion, Bergee even suggests some specific reasons for why that might be. It adds to the body of scientific research showing linkages between music and math/reading. The study has implications for school-board members considering budgets that impact music programs. student, currently a visiting professor of music education at the University of Washington, Kevin M. That the study of more than 1,000 mainly middle-school-aged students showed no such association at the classroom or school levels only shows how rigorously it was conceived by Bergee, a professor in the University of Kansas School of Music, and his co-author and Ph.D. His new study,"Multilevel Models of the Relationship Between Music Achievement and Reading and Math Achievement," published in the Journal of Research in Music Education, showed statistically significant associations between the two at both the individual and the school-district levels.
