Towards evidence-based music teaching and learning: A meta-analysis

k = 20 articles yielding 25 effect sizes, screened from 93,291 records

Music learners across educational levels (school and higher-education music students); outcomes are musical-artistic, not academic

The only meta-analysis located that asks the base question - does teaching music produce MUSICAL skill - rather than the transfer question. That it is the only one, and that it appeared in 2025, is itself the finding: the field has spent five decades meta-analysing whether music raises maths scores and produced one synthesis of whether music teaching raises music scores. Grade C: the pooled designs are mixed quality and the abstract does not report the randomised share. Only 20 of 93,291 screened records survived inclusion, which is a statement about how little of the music- education literature reports an effect size against a comparison group at all.

Music teaching and learning activities have a medium, heterogeneous effect on musical-artistic outcomes: overall d = 0.56 (p < .001), music literacy and sight-reading d = 0.54 (p < .01), performance and aural skills d = 0.51 (p < .001). Effects varied by teaching methodology, outcome category and educational level. No publication bias was identified. The authors report that SPECIALIST music methodologies (Kodály, Orff and similar branded systems) had a LOWER effect than generalist methodologies, that teaching technology had a positive but negligible impact, and that score-study techniques contributed modestly.

Not addressed, and mostly not applicable: the comparison is between teaching conditions, and the outcome is the skill directly taught. Selection into music study is heavily confounded (see Gustavson 2021), but that confound inflates transfer claims, not within-programme contrasts of teaching method.

Published 2025; no independent replication or critique located. The specialist- versus-generalist finding in particular is a single-synthesis result and should not be leaned on.