Journal of Research in Music Education

The purpose of this investigation was to identify and describe the characteristics of effective teaching in the piano studio. Thirteen piano teachers were videotaped with one adult student and one child student during three consecutive lessons each. An 8- to 12-minute segment showing work on a piece in progress was excerpted from each of the 78 lessons. Computerized observation procedures, designed specifically for this and related research, were used to record and analyze teacher behavior, student behavior, and lesson progress. Ten representative excerpts were evaluated by five expert piano pedagogues, who rated the teaching effectiveness observed in each. The expert pedagogues were generally reliable in identifying ineffective teaching, but were less reliable in assessing effective teaching. Correlational analyses were used to identify the lesson characteristics associated with effective and ineffective ratings. Relatively active teachers were ranked higher than were inactive teachers. Active teachers provided more modeling and gave more feedback. Student performance episodes generally were shorter among the more active teachers, and students of the more active teachers tended to perform mare successfully. The duration and pace of behavior episodes were important variables in discriminating among levels of instructional quality, with shorter episodes and, thus, faster pace associated with more effective teaching.

Part 1 of this study was an investigation of the verbal instruction used during 60 rehearsals by expert, novice, and student teachers. Frequency distributions were established for 15 performance variables and 10 rehearsal variables and comments as well as for the number of complete sequential patterns of instruction. Part 2 was a pre-experimental study to determine changes in instruction evidenced by preservice teachers (22 rehearsals) exposed to guided observation as part of an instrumental methods course. Evidence suggests that all three groups of teachers address rhythm/tempo the most frequently. Expert teachers devoted more time to overall ensemble sound (including more demonstrations, instruction/explanations on intonation, and guided listening); of their rehearsal segments, 23% were complete sequential patterns. Novice teachers spent the most time tuning individual notes, whereas student teachers spent the most time correcting wrong notes. Gains for the undergraduates included less emphasis on wrong notes and greater emphasis on rhythm/tempo and style. The percentage of complete sequential patterns of instruction used by undergraduates nearly tripled with minimal training.

The purpose of this study was to compare the responses of preservice teachers and experienced teachers when asked, “What skills and behaviors are important to successful music teaching in the first three years of experience?” The sample consisted of randomly selected groups of preservice teachers (n = 35) and experienced teachers (n = 35). Subjects were given a list of teacher skills/behaviors and asked to rate the level of importance of each item using a 4-point Likert-type scale. For each item, the mean score for both groups was calculated and used to determine rank order. Of the 10 top-ranked items for each group, 7 were common to both groups. On 6 of the 40 items, there existed a difference of 10 or more rankings between the groups. Nine of the 40 items were ranked equally or within one ranking of each other. As an ex post facto measure, each of the items was placed into one of three broad skill categories (personal, musical, or teaching). A two-way ANOVA with repeated measures was used to determine that both groups rated personal skills and teaching skills as significantly more important than musical skills.

The purpose of this study was to examine graduate and undergraduate music majors' ability to detect pitch arid rhythm errors in one-, two-, and three-part settings of texturally contrasting musical excerpts. A stimulus audiotape consisting of 12 excerpts resulted from the following arrangement by texture and number of parts: 4 one-part excerpts, 2 two-part and 2 three-part homorhythmic excerpts, and 2 two-part and 2 three-part polyrhythmic excerpts. Subjects (N = 150) listened to purposefully marred recorded performances of these excerpts and attempted to identify pitch and rhythm errors by circling appropriate places on correctly notated scores. Results of analyses of variance with repeated measures on correct responses indicated significant main effects of degree status (graduate students were more accurate than were undergraduates); number of parts (subjects were most accurate in one-part settings, less accurate in two-part settings, and least accurate in three-part settings); texture (subjects were more accurate in homorhythmic texture than in polyrhythmic texture); and. error type (subjects were more accurate detecting rhythm errors than pitch errors). Significant interactions indicated that these variables did not function independently of each other.

Results of a previous study revealed that musically untrained listeners showed a significant, age-related increase in their sensitivity to rhythmic information when judging the degree of difference between a theme and selected pitch and rhythm variations. There was no corresponding increase in their sensitivity to pitch information, and there were no age-related differences in the overall integration process used to reach their judgments. The purpose of this study was to test the possibility that the developmental differences found in the earlier study were due to specific characteristics of the test melody used. Musical novices were randomly sampled from Grades 1, 5, and 9 of three elementary schools and three high schools from three different suburban school districts. Adult musical novices were chosen from elementary education majors tested at the beginning of their required music course. Results using a new, contrasting test melody confirmed the findings of the first study regarding the increased importance of rhythmic information. However, some melody-related differences were found. Implications for early music education experiences and future research in perceptual development are discussed.

In the present study, focus of attention to musical elements was investigated in an attempt to ascertain which elements are perceived as most prominent in relation to aesthetic response as demonstrated in previous work. One hundred experienced musicians listened to the last 20 minutes of Act I of Puccini's La Bohème. Fifty musicians indicated via the Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI) which of five musical elements (Melody, Rhythm, Timbre, Dynamics, or Everything) commanded their attention as they listened throughout the excerpt. Additionally, another 50 subjects, divided into five groups of 10 subjects each, registered their degree of attention for each specific musical element; these subjects had only one element presented on the CRDI dial with instructions to register their degree of attention to this specific element throughout the selection. Results from those subjects who tracked all elements simultaneously indicated that the highest percentage of attention throughout the entire excerpt was registered for Dynamics, followed closely by the elements Everything, Melody, Rhythm, and Timbre. For those subjects who responded to only one element, the highest degree of attentiveness was registered for Melody, followed by the elements Dynamics and Everything. Timbre was next in degree-of-attentiveness rating, and rhythm was by far the lowest. The element Melody was most closely related to aesthetic responsiveness for this Puccini excerpt.

Two universities were selected to evaluate music fundamentals software developed for prospective nursery-school through sixth-grade teachers. Using folk songs as examples, the investigator designed computer-assisted instructional (CAI) software to supply future teachers with a repertoire of songs and related music concepts for classroom use. Subjects at the first university (N = 148) were enrolled in a music fundamentals and performance skills course, the first of two music courses for preservice teachers. Subjects at the second university (N = 95) were enrolled in a music methods and materials course, the only music course for preservice teachers offered at this site. A comparison of posttest scores of control (in-class lecture) and experimental (CAI) groups yielded no significant differences in either experiment. Students in both experiments thought the song examples were helpful. Furthermore, reducing class time spent with music theory allowed instructors to spend more time with other instructional tasks, potentially enabling students to improve in other performance areas.

Path analysis was used to test a model designed to encapsulate the flow of influences theorized to exist between five types of musical performance and four factors derived from a researcher-administered questionnaire. Results, using a sample of 101 high school wind instrumentalists, reveal major differences in the pattern of influences leading to the re-creative skill of performing a repertoire of rehearsed music for a formal music examination, compared to the creative ability of improvising. Performing a repertoire of rehearsed music was found to be influenced most by an ability to sight-read, together with a factor consisting of variables concerned with the length of time a subject had been studying his or her instrument and taking lessons. In sharp contrast, an ability to improvise was most markedly influenced by an ability to play by ear. Results for this sample of instrumentalists exposed to a “traditional” style of teaching also suggest that instrumentalists' ability to sight-read may be influenced by how well they are able to play by ear.

The purpose of the study was to determine which women were mentioned most frequently in general United States music education history books and to examine the contexts in which the authors discussed women's work. A survey of individuals interested in music education history was then conducted to determine whether they would recognize the names of these women and whether they would consider them important to the music education field. An examination of five histories revealed 334 citations for 164 women. Only 11 women's names were mentioned five or more times. A questionnaire was sent to 39 respondents, who were invited to rate each of the 11 names for recognition of the woman's name and her work in music education. Agreement regarding name recognition was found to exist between histories and the 28 respondents who returned the questionnaire.

This study offers a look at accepted standards for evaluation of eminence and productivity in the scientific community and updates the database established by Standley (1984) from the contents of the three premier journals in the field of music education/therapy research: the Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME), the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (CRME), and the Journal of Music Therapy (JMT). Data from the last 10 years were combined with those in the prior study (inception of the journals through 1982) to identify music researchers with the most publications in the three journals evaluated, to identify the most productive universities in contributing to the research literature, and to identify the most-cited scholars in the field for a period representing a span of more than 40 years. Due to the advent and reliance upon computerized literature searches, the classification of productive authors' research by specialists outside the field was also analyzed to ascertain retrievability. Generally, these results showed that, on average, only 50% of selected authors' works were retrievable via combined searches of ERIC and PsycLit and that most authors' studies were labeled with great diversity. Implications for standards of evaluating eminence, for the ongoing compilation of eminence/productivity data, and for use of computerized databases to locate research are discussed.