Music Lessons Enhance Iq

564 Words3 Pages
Throughout the history of men, people have been searching far and wide for anything and everything they can possibly do to make them smarter. Innumerable theories have been formed about a variety of things, all claiming that if one engages in this or that activity, their intelligence will increase. A particularly interesting theory that has been around for many years is the theory that taking music lessons can increase your IQ, which has been tested in numerous experiments, such as recorded in Psychological Bulletin by S.M. Barnett, and Mozart Effect by C.F. Chabris. This subject is addressed in the article Music Lessons Enhance IQ, where researchers conduct an experiment on a group of six year old children; giving two groups music lessons for one year, one group drama lessons for one year, and one group no lessons. The lessons lasted for 36 weeks, with several different teachers conducting the classes. The WISC-III test, the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement, and the Parent Rating Scale of Behavioral Assessment System for Children were all administered before the experiment commenced. The hypothesis that the researcher’s came up with for this experiment was, quite obviously, that musical lessons enhance IQ. The independent variables in this experiment were the music lessons, and the dependent variables were the children’s IQ. The control groups were the group of children who received drama lessons, and the group of children who received no lessons at all. The independent variable, the music lessons, is the variable that affected the dependent variable, the IQ of the six-year-old children. The experiment, in theory, should seem quite simple and easy to gather results from. However, this is not always the case. Confounding variables, variables other than the independent variables that could inadvertently affect the dependent variable, could alter this
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