Abstract
The goal of this research was to carry out an exploratory study on how music education integrated into primary schooling (children from 6 to 12 years old) can help in acquiring the core competencies characteristic of this stage. The study was conducted by developing a validated instrument, pilot-tested for reliability, to assess the eight core competencies. Pupils in their final year of primary education in the two schools integrating primary education and music that exist in Catalonia were evaluated by comparing them with a control group from ordinary schools.
The results of the research show that, although music pupils do not attend more than the minimum number of class contact hours legally established for all curriculum areas (except the arts), they obtained better results when performing a test on all the core competencies.
Introduction
In Spain the study of music in compulsory education is no longer compulsory for the whole population. In this study we consider data related to the importance of music for the integral development of the individual.
In Spanish integrated arts centers, legalized since 1990, all the ordinary subjects are studied but also those relevant to a school of music and dance. With the advent of these centers, it has become necessary to evaluate them. This research focuses on assessing the acquisition of core competencies by pupils at the two integrated primary and music schools existing in Catalonia.
The third educational revolution: equity and quality in education
If, as Delors says (1996), education has to adapt to changes in society while still passing on the acquired knowledge, foundations, and fruits of human experience, we need to contextualize the current reality of the education system in Catalonia as a prelude to our analysis. Esteve (2003) speaks of three educational revolutions, situating the first in the creation of schools in ancient Egypt, a circumstance that generalized the concept of the school as an institution devoted specifically to teaching. Later, the second revolution came with the creation in 18th-century Prussia of the first nationwide network of schools, when a state took responsibility for education for the very first time, with the aim of ensuring that it was available to all children (a principle of equity that has not yet been applied in many countries). And, more recently, the third, which began in the 1990s, presents a new challenge for educational systems today: the idea of quality. Today, we speak of a widely generalized education, offered in conditions of high quality.
Faced by this demand for equity and quality, the European Union has begun to formulate the goals of education in terms of the acquisition of competencies. Specifically, the Spanish legislation on education defines the primary stage as a fundamental, free, and compulsory step intended to provide all children with the competencies needed for their personal and social development.
Therefore, primary education in Catalonia is an educational stage that, despite being divided up by subjects, is based on the concept of the integral education of the individual through the acquisition of core competencies, in the sense defined by Morin (2000; 11) when he stated that “the human condition should be the essential purpose of all education.”
Following on from this concept, the primary curriculum determines this stage as the one where the core competencies and the tools needed for further learning are acquired. It also lays the foundations of an education based on personal autonomy, responsibility, solidarity, freedom, participation, and personal and collective commitment.
We thought it more interesting to carry out this research at the end of a core educational stage, at a point when the goals of education are clearly defined for the pupils in both arts-integrated and ordinary schools.
It is towards the end of primary schooling, at the age of 11, that the foundations of a person’s education—on which all future learning is based—become firmly established.
Integrated primary and music schools
Since 1990, with the implementation of the LOGSE (Law on the General Organization of the Education System) (Ley orgánica 1/1990, 1990) and later education laws, the teaching of music in Spain has been planned in parallel to the organization of ordinary education. These laws allow schools to be founded where the general goals required of all generalist education merge with the specialized goals of music on a curricular level, and where timetables and spaces are shared by the two types of studies—those corresponding to ordinary primary education and those characteristic of music schools. Furthermore, the teaching staff is able to pool pedagogical aspects, unify criteria and working methods, and carry out thorough, global, and inclusive monitoring of the pupils as regards both their general and artistic education.
In this regulatory context, the IEA (Institut Escola Artístic) Oriol Martorell was opened in September 1997, a school where primary education is integrated with both music and dance, and secondary with music only. On the other hand, a school with the above characteristics has existed in Catalonia since the 13th century, the Abbey of Montserrat Choir School (officially the Escolania de Montserrat), which currently integrates the last 3 years of primary schooling and the first 2 of compulsory secondary education.
Students are admitted to these centers following tests to evaluate their artistic aptitudes. At both centers the study of music is more economical for families than at any specialized music school; the IEA Oriol Martorell is public and the fees for artistic studies are subsidized (it is much less expensive than any other music school), while the Escolania de Montserrat, owned by the Benedictine community, is funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and parents pay only 20% of the fees.
Students at these two schools have an important workload in music. This is possible because the curriculum in Catalonia establishes a minimum timetable of class contact hours for the different subject areas and sets aside an ample amount of time to be used discretionally. This means that schools, depending on their situation, characteristics, educational project, needs, and so on, can decide their own curriculum.
The distribution of school hours during the 6 years of primary education is as shown in Table 1.
School hours in primary education in Catalonia.
The aforesaid integrated schools devote all discretional class time to music. Specifically, at primary level in the Escolánia de Montserrat, 6 hours 40 minutes of music a week are taught in grade 4 and 12 hours 10 minutes a week in grades 5 and 6. In the case of the IEA Oriol Martorell, 10 hours 30 minutes of music a week are taught from third to sixth grade.
Consequently, these students only devote the minimum amount of time stipulated by law to ordinary studies, which might reasonably lead us to expect that they would perform worse in core subjects such as mathematics and languages. Our hypothesis was that music integrated into primary education can have a positive impact on the acquisition of core competencies during this stage.
Core competencies in education and their assessment
Today, many European curricula are designed in terms of competency acquisition. This term is directly related to the goals of the education system because it encompasses the idea of a global education for all children and also considers the quality of education.
The term competency comes from the world of work. According to Whiddett and Hollyforde (2003: 7) “Competencies are behaviors that individuals demonstrate when undertaking job-relevant tasks effectively within a given organizational context,” while Sarramona (2004) states that a person is competent when he or she can solve problems with efficiency, speed, and economy within his or her sphere of expertise. These definitions tie in with the significance of the term competency in education: competency is the capacity or ability to perform tasks or deal efficiently with different situations in a given context, and to achieve competency it is necessary to mobilize attitudes, skills and knowledge (Zabala and Arnau, 2007). It is a very wide-ranging concept and the planning of a curriculum in terms of competencies is an interesting alternative to the traditional academic curriculum because it shifts the focus from the logic of knowledge to the fourfold goal of knowledge, know-how, social skills and responsibility, and personal fulfillment.
Specifically, the core competencies are defined as follows within the Catalan education system (Departament D’ensenyament and Consell Superior D’avaluació Del Sistema Educatiu, 2003):
They are valid for all the population, regardless of gender, social and cultural condition, and family background.
They can be adapted to many contexts in very complex ways.
They have an inclusive character that relates knowledge, procedures, emotions, values, and attitudes.
They evolve throughout life.
They help to obtain results by overcoming complex challenges.
In Europe, the evaluation of core competencies is used to help gather and present data on education. However, while much of the curriculum is common to all industrialized countries, the competencies that lie outside the standard curricular categories tend to vary. There is no general agreement among most education systems on what competencies are needed for life. There is a broad consensus that there are learning outcomes that do not correspond directly to curricular subject areas, and that these results are very important, but there is no agreement on what they are exactly.
In Catalonia, work started in 1998 on identifying the core competencies of compulsory education. The establishment of the primary education curriculum began in 2007 with the following core competencies serving as a starting point:
the communicative competencies (linguistic, audiovisual, artistic, and cultural);
the methodological competencies (information processing and digital literacy, mathematics and learning to learn);
the personal competencies (autonomy and personal initiative); and
the specific competencies focused on living together and living in the world (in terms of knowledge and interaction with the physical world and the social and community environment).
Arnau (2009) considers that a commitment to competency-based teaching implies a complex change in the teaching and learning process, in the school organization, in teacher training and, therefore, in the forms of assessment. To assess competencies, it is necessary to introduce changes in the methods used to make them more accurate (Monereo, 2010): through changes in the problem situation, in the type and complexity of the questions, in the type of help given to pupils, in the additional information, and in the valuation of the tests.
A number of key factors must be taken into account when assessing competencies: competency is global; it is necessary to know how to interrelate; the questions must be knowledge-based and productive; and, furthermore, components of competencies need to be assessed, parts that help to interrelate many aspects (Sanmartí, 2008).
Research development and design
The goal of this research was to find out if students at integrated schools perform better than those in ordinary ones. Having made the educational paradigm of human completeness our main concern, it therefore became necessary to assess pupils’ global learning. To do this, the acquisition of the eight core competencies was evaluated.
In a previous exploratory study, an analysis had been carried out of the results obtained by the students at an integrated music and dance center, the Institut-Escola Oriol Martorell, in all the core competency tests conducted by the Catalan Department of Education during the 2000-01 to 2006-07 academic years (Andreu, 2008). Specifically, and with regard to music, that study confirmed the good results obtained by students at this integrated music school, even though these students had only completed the minimum number of class contact hours in all curricular areas except art. Unfortunately, these official tests were rather limited: they basically evaluated mathematics, language, and social competencies, with no control over the instrument or filtering of results.
A study by Kvet (1985) also served as a reference for our research. It found no significant differences in reading, language, and mathematics performance among sixth graders at schools where some of the students missed ordinary classes to attend instrument classes. Here, also, pupils’ academic performance and the areas of languages and mathematics were analyzed, but not other aspects that are also very important for the integral development of the individual.
Therefore, we decided that further research was necessary.
Our research goal was to find out if pupils attending integrated music and primary schools in Catalonia performed better in the acquisition of core competencies than pupils at ordinary schools.
Method
A validated instrument was developed to assess the eight core competencies on the curriculum, aimed at students in sixth-grade primary education. This instrument was used to assess all the sixth-grade pupils in the two integrated primary and music schools in Catalonia and a control group of pupils from ordinary primary schools. This latter group followed a standard curriculum with all the ordinary subjects, devoting 665 discretional hours to non-artistic content in the curricular areas that the teaching staff consider most in need of reinforcement.
The sample group consisted of 33 children aged 11 to 12 years old attending the integrated music schools in Catalonia in the 2010-11 school year. These made up the entire body of sixth-grade pupils pursuing a combination of ordinary primary studies and a broad musical curriculum at the same school, namely the sixth-grade classes from the Escolania de Montserrat and the Institut-Escola Oriol Martorell. The control group consisted of 69 pupils from three ordinary schools in Catalonia with comparable educational methodologies, who were selected carefully by looking for a similar cultural and socioeconomic background to that of the above centers.
Two types of variables were controlled in the research: the active variables, i.e., the type of school (ordinary or integrated) and the competency under assessment; and a number of intervening variables that we were interested in controlling in each of the evaluated pupils. The intervening variables were those considered significant in the PISA tests: gender, parents’ academic qualifications, parents’ employment status, computer availability, Internet and reference book availability at home. Given that the test was performed in Catalan and Spanish, the two curricular languages used in Catalonia, pupils were asked what language they usually spoke at home and how long they had lived in Catalonia (specifying the number of years), apart from assessing foreign language competency (English)
By controlling these variables we were able to establish profiles for the sample and the control group, creating a subgroup referred to as the homogenous group, where six of these variables coincided: both the father and the mother had completed university studies and had stable employment, and these pupils had computer and internet access at home. This group accounted for 26.5% of all pupils tested (27), and the subjects were distributed as follows within the group: 48.2% were pupils attending an integrated school (13) and 51.8%, an ordinary school (14). Thus, we obtained a very balanced group, in which the results of the research could also be analyzed with the object of controlling the possible influence of the variables intervening in the results (Figure 1).
The study included the comparison of the whole sample and the homogenous group.
The assessment instrument
One of the most important parts of the research was the development of the instrument. This had to take into account the crosscutting nature of the competencies, since to be competent an individual must have the capacity to mobilize different resources at the same time in order to deal with different situations (Perrenoud, 1999), and this mobilization must be put into practice interrelatedly. An extensive review of the literature revealed that there was a theoretical vacuum regarding global assessment instruments that evaluate the eight core competencies on the Catalan curriculum. So, we created a test that we called “Odysseus in the land of the Cyclops.” How the instrument was designed was vital to the research, not only in view of its content but also the underlying educational philosophy. The methodology involved in competency-based teaching and learning draws on cross-cutting teaching sequences that bring the different competencies into play simultaneously. Therefore, the characteristics of this instrument were as follows:
As real a situation as possible was used as a starting point.
The instrument evolved as the subjects were questioned, in such a way that they had to solve or find solutions to the various problems by resorting to each and every one of the core competencies.
Each of the items focused on the evaluation of a single competency, to avoid ambiguity and extract the results of the assessment.
Each competency under assessment was studied to decide on:
1. the exact meaning of the acquisition of competency in the primary stage;
2. the dimensions of the aforesaid competency;
3. the appropriate items needed to assess each of these dimensions; and
4. the assessment criteria.
This process was carried out in collaboration with experts from the various curricular areas.
In the test pupils were asked to prepare a theatrical play based on a text adapted from the Odyssey, specifically the part describing Odysseus’ arrival in the land of the Cyclops. After reading the text they had to respond to and resolve 53 items: ten identifying the pupil’s school, profile, and sociocultural background, ten which consisted of choosing a single correct answer from among the proposals, three where the correct answer was multiple, and four where participants had to choose one answer per row in a matrix. A further 26 items were open questions (ten a single line, nine consisting of a matrix of open questions, and seven texts). Each item was unequivocal in its evaluation of one of the core competencies. The evaluation criteria for each item were established with the help of experts in each field. Statistical analyses were carried out using SPSS. This test, which was unprecedented, was conducted online, thus making it possible to evaluate one of the core competencies in situ: information processing and digital literacy. Each pupil was allowed to use all the tools provided by computer technology (calculator, translators, access to information).
The test was prepared as follows:
An initial instrument was developed on the basis of the review of the literature dealing with each competency and with the support and consensus of experts from different fields.
This instrument was validated by a review panel and the results and remarks obtained through this validation, together with the experts’ proposals, were used to modify it and create the pilot instrument.
This pilot instrument was tested by 59 sixth-grade students during the 2009–10 academic year.
The results of the pilot test were used to conduct a reliability study that resulted in further modification of the instrument, leading to the definitive version.
A second validation was performed to evaluate the relevance and unambiguousness of the items, with very positive results.
Once the pupils had taken the test, a second reliability study was conducted, giving a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.85, with all the items contributing to the stability of this measure (Figure 2).
Test preparatory process.
Results
The results for each one of the core competencies were analyzed and presented separately, as well as the overall results of the test and a synthesis of results, always in relation to all the assessed pupils and also to the homogenous group, the group of pupils coming from a similar sociocultural background. Pupils were considered to have passed the test when they scored 5 out of 10 or more. In integrated schools 90.91% of the pupils passed the test, as compared to 52.17% of pupils in ordinary schools (Figure 3).
Percentage of pupils who passed the test.
Comparing the results obtained by the homogenous group, 100% of students in integrated schools passed the test, as compared to only 50% in ordinary schools (Figure 4).
Percentage of pupils in the homogenous group who passed the test.
With regard to analysis of the results concerning the acquisition of each competency, the process was as follows:
The result of the acquisition of each of the competencies was calculated on the basis of the associated items, extracting the mean.
The Student’s t-test was used to determine the equality of the means in independent groups (α ⩽ 0.05).
Figure 5 shows the results. The means obtained by the pupils in each competency are indicated. The global test result is indicated in the last column. Where this result is significant, it is indicated by an asterisk.
Results of the test according to the type of school, for each of the assessed competencies and indicating the significance of Student’s t-test.
It can be observed that the group of students from integrated centers obtained significantly better results in each of the competencies. No results are displayed in the table for the C3 competency, which involves information processing and digital literacy, because it was not given the same treatment in the data analysis as the other competencies. Digital literacy was assessed during the test itself, as this was entirely computer-based, using and modifying different sounds, images, and other types of files, and browsing and searching for information. Only one item refers to the aforesaid competency, I46, which was analyzed with contingency tables that indicated the response frequency. Although the results from the integrated schools were better, no significance in the results was obtained.
Figure 6 shows the results obtained by the homogenous group.
Results of the test in the HOMOGENOUS GROUP according to the type of school, for each of the assessed competencies and indicating the significance of Student’s t-test.
A tendency to obtain better results is observable among pupils from integrated schools, although the results are only significantly better in the case of autonomy and personal initiative (C6).
Discussion
We have taken a clear stance on an educational approach in this research: an approach based on the importance of core competencies for the integral development of the individual in conjunction with the associated educational philosophy.
The assessment test developed during this research is one of its key contributions. It is a validated, pilot-tested instrument, which was tailored to extract the information we needed and which generates results displaying high reliability. This instrument enabled us to group students by contextual situations, fine-tuning the results.
With respect to the goal of the research—to find out if the acquisition of core competencies among pupils in integrated music and primary schools in Catalonia is superior to that achieved in ordinary schools—our conclusions are as follows:
1. The percentage of students who passed the test is higher in integrated schools than in ordinary schools.
2. The mean obtained for each of the assessed competencies is higher among pupils from integrated centers and the difference is significant, except in the case of information processing and digital literacy, where the results were equivalent.
These conclusions are confirmed by the results obtained by the homogenous group, where pupils came from a similar sociocultural background:
1. The results were confirmed, since all pupils from integrated schools passed the test while only half from ordinary schools did so.
2. The mean obtained for personal competency (autonomy and personal initiative) was significantly higher among pupils from integrated schools, while the results were similar in the case of the other competencies assessed.
We confirmed our hypothesis that integrated music education in primary schools can have a positive impact on the acquisition of core competencies at this stage, because, on comparing pupils from both different backgrounds and similar backgrounds, we found integrated schools perform better in the acquisition of core competencies in both cases.
This research has provided data on the importance of integrated music study in primary education. Not only does integration help enhance the musical education of a large segment of the population; it can also prepare pupils to cope more successfully with their later studies.
Despite the limitations of this research—derived from the impossibility of assessing randomized groups and the fact that some variables could not be controlled, such as teaching staff stability, teacher training, years of experience, and pupil motivation—we think it helps to confirm the importance of the integration of music in generalist education. We have seen that not only does it not have a negative impact on academic results, given that it reduces the amount of class time devoted to some subjects, but it can actually improve them. For this reason we consider it important to continue this line of work in the future.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.