Background Research!
May 23, 2008

 

We found that many organizations and professors have done a lot of research about athletes and musicians intelligences individually. However, there is not a ton of information comparing the two groups. We found that there has been quite a common thread that athletes are perceived to be less smart than the average student at a college. On the contrary, most people would say that musicians are extremely brainy and studious. GPA would be no exception to this, as the average person seems to think that the average musician has a higher GPA than the average athlete.

According to Music for Young Minds, an organization that does research on young students, students that are involved in music score 51 points higher, on average for the verbal portion of the SAT than students with no course work. They’ve also found that music students score 44 points higher on the math portion of the SAT. After interviewing CEO’s and Congressmen, they found that 90% of them claimed that playing an instrument as a child gave them a good foundation for character and leadership. A 1997 Gallup survey was conducted and 69% of people believe that music participation leads to better academic performance.

 For athletes, The Melrose Public School System in Massachusetts had a lot of interesting comments. The writer of an article entitled ”Are Athletes Academically Inferior to Non-Athletes?” stressed the idea that athletic participation has a positive influence on academics. Athletes generally have better attendance, higher academic performance, and higher goals than non-athletes. Studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between Atheletic Participation and Grade Point Average earned. Another study, done by Ira Rebella, shows that the more sports an athlete participates in, the higher the Grade Point Average tends to be.

A study was done by Michael Zwart that examined the GPA and Standardized test scores of athletes and musicians. He stratified samples of both groups and ran t tests on them. He found that in the sample he had studied, music students had slightly higher test scores and GPAs than athletes.

Generally, Athletes tend to be in school a lot, because they must be in order to practice after school and play in weekly contests. The good attendance rates keep their knowledge of subject material high, which do usually result in good grades. Musicians also have to be fairly smart if they want to be any good at music. A musician who doesn’t think very hard about what they want to accomplish or perform will not go very far. It is generally agreed upon by most of the information we found that both athletes and musicians benefit from the activities they are involved in.

There seems to be plenty of information available on an athlete’s GPA, or the intelligence of musicians. They all seem to agree that both playing sports and being involved in the production of music have positive effects on students. They keep them out of trouble and give them the chance to become well rounded people. But there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of information comparing and contrasting the two groups. We struggled to find data on the comparison of athletes and musicians. There have been plenty of studies done on how athletic participation has impacted the GPA of students, and on how music participation has impacted GPA. However, there hasn’t been much material comparing the two. We hope that through this study we will be able to produce valid conclusions about who truly earns a higher grade point average on average.