Assessment and Neurodiversity in Music Education, A plain language essay

Abstract

This essay looks at how music assessment and neurodiversity overlap. Music assessment usually means graded exams, written theory papers and teacher feedback. It sets out what a candidate should know and do, and it judges how well they do this. Neurodiversity means that people process information in different ways. This includes autistic people, people with ADHD, people with dyslexia, and people with dyspraxia. I ask a simple question: does the format of music assessment, rather than a candidate’s musical skill, sometimes get in the way? I look at what assessment usually involves, then explain common neurodivergent traits that affect how someone reads instructions or processes spoken directions, drawing partly on my own experience as a dyslexic musician. I then look closely at where these two things meet, using research on working memory, dyslexia and music reading, and the neurodiversity movement itself. Finally, I discuss some alternative methods, including universal design for learning, that could reduce this mismatch. My argument is not that musical standards should drop. It is that some of the difficulty neurodivergent candidates face has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with how assessment is delivered. This essay uses plain language theory to support my message about accessibility.

Introduction

As a guitar tutor for many years, I have watched pupils freeze up over a specific discussion around exams, not just because of the daunting musical task but because they could not work out what was actually being asked of them and the format around them. This happens often enough that I no longer think of it as a singular pupil’s problem. I think of it as a pattern.

Music assessment matters in all forms. It decides who progresses, who gets a certificate, and sometimes who is accepted into further study. Because it matters this much, it is worth asking whether it works equally well for everyone, or whether some learners are quietly disadvantaged by the systems and formats that have nothing to do with their playing.

Neurodiversity is now a well-established topic of discussion in education. It states that differences in how people think and process information are a normal part of human variation, not simply a deficit to fix (Singer, 1999). Music education has been somewhat slower to catch up with some of these ideas than some other subjects. This essay will ask what that gap looks like in practice.

I start by explaining what assessment means in music, both formally and day to day. I then go on to explain neurodiversity and its common forms, and set out my own position as a dyslexic musician who went through this system myself. The main section looks at where the two overlap, such as which parts of assessment cause difficulty and for which learners. I then look at alternative methods that could close some of that gap, before ending with what this means for teachers and exam boards.

What assessment means in music

Music assessment normally works on two levels, the first being formal assessments. This usually means examination boards such as ABRSM, Rockschool, or Trinity, where pupils are tested on set pieces and theory. The other common formal assessment is in-school exams like SQA National 5, Higher, and Advanced Higher. Both types of formal assessment focus on similar topics, such as technical accuracy, sight-reading, aural skills, performance, and sometimes composition or music theory. In these assessments, the pupil is judged against a fixed standard and is often given only one attempt to prove they possess these skills.

The second type of assessment is informal assessment. This normally comes from ongoing feedback a teacher gives during a lesson, but it can also include peer feedback in group settings, and a tutor’s own sense of how a pupil is progressing. Throughout a lesson, informal assessments happen constantly but are rarely written down, checked, or scrutinised the same way formal exams are.

Both assessment types rely heavily on pupils completing several smaller tasks at once. They have to read or hear an instruction, understand it, and act on it, often under time pressure. A written theory asks a pupil to break down what is being asked and answer it within the allotted time. An aural test gives spoken instructions, often only once, then expects an immediate answer. A sight-reading test does the same but with breaking down a piece of notation added on top of the aural exam.

What neurodiversity means and common types

Neurodiversity is the idea that all human brains vary naturally in how they work, think, and process information. The research says this is an expected part of being human, not a set of faults to be corrected. The term grew out of the autism self-advocacy community in the 1990s. Sociologist Judy Singer first discussed it academically (1999), comparing neurological diversities to other kinds of human diversity. Later research has shown that most people who use the term hold two things at once, which is that neurological difference is a genuine and valid way of being, and that it can still involve real difficulty in a world not designed with these differences in mind (Kapp et al., 2013). Neurodiversity does not deny difficulty. It instead places difficulty in another area outwith what is being assessed in these exams.

Several specific profiles that I wish to touch on in this essay, but it is important to note there are many other profiles out there. Autistic people frequently process instructions best when they are direct, literal, and free of implied meaning. Many also need more time to process spoken information, which matters in a fast-moving exam scenario. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is strongly linked to working memory difficulties. This makes it hard to hold long or multi-step instructions in mind while carrying them out. This pattern is clearly shown in classroom research on working memory and instruction following (Gathercole and Alloway, 2008). Dyslexia affects how someone reads and understands written text. Within music specifically, this can make it hard to read and remember notation within exercises like sight-reading, even if the person’s musical knowledge and ability are strong (Ganschow, Lloyd-Jones and Miles, 1994; Miles and Westcombe, 2001). Dyspraxia affects motor skills and coordination and commonly involves difficulty following multi-step instructions. These profiles overlap, and none of them says anything negative about a person's musical knowledge but instead, they describe different ways a neurodivergent person processes the same information.

My own experience of Dyslexia and Assessment

It is important to note that for this discussion, I am coming from the place of someone with dyslexia, and I went through the exam system myself, so some of what follows is largely a personal account but also a form of research. I also want to note that one person’s experience doesn’t prove a pattern, and every person is different. Still, it is one reason I chose to discuss this topic in the first place and something I intend to note before moving into the wider argument.

For me, sight-reading was the part of the exam process I dreaded the most. I could play all my pieces and the sight-reading piece with time, but I always felt the format never allowed that time. The stress of sitting the exam often made that feeling of not having enough time worse, and the notes on the stave seemed to jump. Before I started playing, the examiner would talk through key aspects like the key signature, the time signature, and a couple of things to watch out for, but hearing all the instructions at once added to the pressure and made me forget key information they had just passed on. In many ways, this test started to feel like a memory test of what the examiner had told me rather than a musical one.

For my Grade 5 ABRSM theory test and SQA written exams, I found them extremely challenging; I often had to read each question 2/3 times before I could figure out what it was asking. Often this was not a symptom of lacking knowledge or a musical idea behind the question being difficult, but because the sentence itself was another barrier to navigate. I sometimes ran out of time not because I didn't know the material, but because the reading in those papers challenged me in a way other learners did not experience.

Aural tests had similar issues: the examiner would give instructions like, "We will give you a melody, and you sing it back to us, then tell us what time signature it was in, or whether it was major or minor," often as one long list of questions. By the 3rd bar into singing, I would have completely forgotten what the melody sounded like and didn’t understand how others could manage that. But looking back, I can see that string of questions overloaded my brain, and if I had done each one individually, I would have managed fine.

What stayed with me all these years since my last exam wasn't one single moment of overwhelming challenge but instead, it was lots of smaller, quiet assumptions running through the whole system. There felt like there was an assumption that if you could not succeed in this format, you must be musically behind the rest. While this was never said directly to me, the exam results and gradebooks themselves leave little room to say otherwise. It took me a while to separate the parts of the grade result that reflected my playing that day from the parts that reflected how well the assessment format happened to suit me. This is part of what I now try to notice from my pupils from the teacher’s perspective. When a pupil of mine repeatedly asks to repeat an instruction, or looks lost halfway through a piece, I try to recognise this because I remember what it feels like. I have tried not to overgeneralise my own case since dyslexia affects people differently, and other neurodivergent profiles bring their own, different difficulties to the same formats (Ganschow, Lloyd-Jones and Miles, 1994; Miles and Westcombe, 2001). But this is one reason this essay exists, so it feels dishonest not to discuss it.

How these overlap and interact

The clearest overlap between assessment and neurodiversity shows up in how instructions and criteria are delivered, not in the musical content itself. The sightreading part of most exams is a good example of this. The pupil is given a short piece of unfamiliar notation and a limited time to prepare. The examiner often points out the tempo, key, and dynamics before the student is asked to play. For an autistic pupil who needs a little more time, this can be far too much to process, especially for a candidate with dyspraxia who needs the sequence broken into definite steps, this format is already working against them before a single note is played. For a pupil with dyslexia, this format can lead to visual stress, tracking errors, or misreading the notes, which can make this type of exam even more difficult.

Working memory is key to this problem of being given too much information at once. Research on ADHD shows that the more information an instruction packs into a single statement, the more likely it will be lost, even when the person fully understands each part (Gathercole and Alloway 2008). A spoken exam instruction that bundles several requirements together, while expecting a candidate to take in the information and then act on it, takes a heavy toll even on people without working memory difficulties. For someone with ADHD, it is often too heavy to manage in one go.

Written theory papers and mark scheme descriptors raise a different but related problem. Many of these questions and explanations are long, sentence-dense, and full of technical vocabulary that the candidate is expected to know rather than be explained. For a candidate with dyslexia, breaking down this kind of writing can take real effort on its own, before the musical content is even reached. Research on dyslexia and music shows this clearly. Dyslexic musicians can understand a musical concept perfectly well while still struggling to extract it from a densely worded question (Miles and Westcombe, 2001). The difficulty lies in the reading task, not necessarily in musicianship, which I noticed and matched to my experience of taking these tests.

Performance assessments add another factor: the exam environment itself. An unfamiliar room, examiner and a fixed time slot can raise anxiety for any candidate, but this is further exaggerated for a person with a neurodivergent profile. Autistic candidates may find an unfamiliar sensory environment especially difficult to manage while also trying to perform. A candidate with ADHD may find it harder to settle and focus under the time pressure. In both cases, the difficulty is not about whether the candidate can play the piece. It is about whether the surrounding conditions let them show that they can.

This interaction between assessment and neurodiversity does not mean that neurodivergent musicians, as a group, are worse at meeting technical standards. If anything, some traits associated with neurodivergent profiles work in a musician's favour. Attributes like strong pattern recognition, sustained focus during practice, and elevated sensitivity to pitch or rhythm are reported strengths. Still, current assessment formats are not designed to notice or credit them (Kapp et al., 2013). This link with neurodiversity and assessment is specifically about delivery of assessments, like how instructions are given, how much has to be held in working memory at once, how much reading is required, and how forgiving the environment is of different mental thinking speeds.

This analysis does have a limit. A music assessment is not purely an exercise in communication. At the centre of the exam process are technical demands like playing in time, in tune, and with control. The goal is not to remove those demands, but to change how instructions are worded and give people with different needs the same platform. The goal is not to lower what is being asked of a candidate musically. It is to separate that genuine musical demand from difficulties unrelated to music, like processing speed, working memory, or sensory environment, all of which could be changed or reduced without changing what is actually being tested. Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

Discussion of alternative methods for assessment

For most major exam boards, some support already exists. Extra time, alternative exam rooms, and the use of readers or scribes are reasonably well established in formal music exams. Their help, and extra time in particular, made a real difference to me in my own theory exams. The issue is that the responsibility to request these resources and justify an adjustment falls entirely on the candidate, rather than on adjusting the underlying design that caused the difficulty in the first place.

A more structured approach comes from Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This idea focuses on designing materials and environments to work for a wide range of learners from the start, rather than creating accommodations for specific individuals afterwards (CAST, 2024; Meyer, Rose and Gordon, 2013). Applied to music assessment, this could mean providing spoken instructions alongside written ones, breaking long-winded directions into clear, concise, smaller steps, and writing mark scheme descriptors in shorter, simpler sentences with specialist terms explained. None of this changes what’s being tested, but instead, it changes how the assessment is formatted and communicated.

UDL is already being used in parts of music education. Research shows that many music teachers already use flexible strategies such as different notation systems and different assessment formats, even without applying the UDL framework (CAST, 2024; Hourigan, 2015). Building on this could help. Options like portfolio-based assessment and recorded rather than live performances give candidates more control over pacing and allow them to revisit instructions. This would reduce the working-memory and processing-speed pressure that live testing creates. In recent years, all three major exam boards have begun offering an alternative online assessment in which candidates record three pieces and technical exercises designed to support pupils with neurodiversity, but also as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

These alternatives are not free from trade-offs. Recorded submissions and portfolios raise questions about consistency and how exam boards can ensure work is comparable across candidates. They also take more time and resources to assess than a single graded exam slot. Even so, they point toward a workable middle ground it is important to keep in mind the goal, which is to keep the musical standard the same, but test it in a way that does not quietly depend on 'candidates' skills outside of music.

Conclusion

Music assessment and neurodiversity overlap most clearly at the point of delivery, not at the musical demand of the assessment. Dense spoken instructions, long-winded descriptors, and unfamiliar exam environments all place a load on a candidate that has very little to do with how well they can play. For neurodivergent candidates, that load is even heavier, not because their musicianship is weaker, but because their processing style does not match the format or the tests used (Kapp et al., 2013; Gathercole and Alloway, 2008). I know this from the research conducted for this article, but also from sitting the exam myself.

For exam boards, this suggests testing materials and formats with neurodivergent musicians, rather than assuming current formats are neutral. For teachers, it suggests paying closer attention to how instructions and feedback are delivered, not only focused on what they contain. Universal Design for Learning already offers a starting framework, and parts of music education already use it without naming it (Hourigan, 2015). What is still missing is a clear sense of how far this redesign can go before it affects the technical standard being tested, and that question is worth further study. For now, the more immediate point stands that some of what looks like a musical struggle is really a communication problem, and communication problems can be fixed.

References

CAST (2024) Universal Design for Learning guidelines (Version 3.0). Available at: https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Ganschow, L., Lloyd-Jones, J. and Miles, T.R. (1994) 'Dyslexia and musical notation', Annals of Dyslexia, 44, pp. 185–202.

Gathercole, S.E. and Alloway, T.P. (2008) Working memory and learning: a practical guide for teachers. London: SAGE Publications.

Hourigan, R. (2015) 'Understanding music and Universal Design for Learning: strategies for students with learning differences in the 21st century', in Conway, C. (ed.) Musicianship-focused curriculum and assessment. Chicago: GIA Publications, pp. 89–112.

Kapp, S.K., Gillespie-Lynch, K., Sherman, L.E. and Hutman, T. (2013) 'Deficit, difference, or both? Autism and neurodiversity', Developmental Psychology, 49(1), pp. 59–71.

Meyer, A., Rose, D.H. and Gordon, D. (2013) Universal Design for Learning: theory and practice. Wakefield, MA: CAST Professional Publishing.

Miles, T.R. and Westcombe, J. (eds.) (2001) Music and dyslexia: opening new doors. London: Whurr Publishers.

Singer, J. (1999) '"Why can't you be normal for once in your life?" From a "problem with no name" to the emergence of a new category of difference', in Corker, M. and French, S. (eds.) Disability discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. 59–67.