Question: If you do a study on the effects of music on children with ADD, ADHD or other such things, could you tell me of the results, so I can hopefully prove to my teachers that music really does help? XD

Joe Bathelt answered on 14 Nov 2016:

I’m not usually doing research on interventions or on the effect of music so I had to do a search to find out what other researchers think. Usually, the most reliable evidence comes from meta-analyses. Those are reports that look at trends that are consistent across individual studies. I found one such paper that looks at the effect of music on school performance in children and adolescents (you can find the whole paper here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/pmu/24/4/328.html). However, when this was published there were only 5 studies on this topic so it is not the most reliable evidence base.

According to their results, music can have moderately positive effects. They found that having background music playing increased the number of maths problems that children and adolescents with ADHD solved correctly. Unfortunately, there are a lot of open questions, like does the type of music matter? how loud should the music be? does the effect depend on age? etc.
So, more research is needed to establish the effectiveness of music to help young people with ADHD in general.
Psychological studies mostly tell us something about groups of people, but there can be huge variation between individuals. You could test if you find things easier when you have music on compared to without, but be critical – you may find background music more enjoyable, but it might actually be distracting you, or it could genuinely help you to focus.