Journal of Research in Music Education

This study is an investigation of several issues relating to teacher retention and attrition. In the spring of 1995, a questionnaire was sent to 225 certified teachers who had all finished a BME during the past 10 years and graduated from the same university. Results indicated that of the senders of 137 returned responses, 24 (17.5%) had chosen not to teach at that time. Specific questions concerned demographic data including years of teaching, area of specialization, amount of professional development, and especially the degree of perceived support received from administration, school, and parents. Retention of this same sample was investigated 6 years later, indicating that 34.4% of the individuals were no longer teaching at the K-college level, well below the average rate of attrition for teachers in other subject areas. Music teachers remaining in the field in 2001 held more positions prior to 1995 than those no longer teaching and regularly participated in professional development activities. Subjects' comments revealed that personal reasons and administrative support concerns were given as the primary rationale for discontent with the education profession. Analysis of gender patterns revealed that women and men leave the profession at different times during the first 10 years of their careers. Implications for teacher training as well as areas of further research are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the preservice music teacher preparation program at a large midwestem university (in this article called “BTU” for “Big Ten University”) through an examination of the perceptions of beginning teachers and their mentors and administrators. Primary research participants included seven first-year teachers from BTU's class of 1999 and seven first-year teachers from the class of 2000. Data from these participants included individual interviews, focus group interviews, teacher journals, classroom observations by the researcher, mentor interviews, administrator interviews, and responses on an open-ended “End-of-Year Questionnaire.”In addition, secondary participants (n = 11) completed the End-of Year Questionnaire regarding their first-year experiences and the teacher preparation program. Results and discussion include descriptions of the perceptions regarding the most valuable parts of preparation and the least valuable parts of preparation, as well as suggestions for preservice teacher preparation made by teachers, mentors, administrators, and the researcher. Issues of validity of results and transferability of findings to other settings are discussed in addition to possible implications for teacher education and music education program evaluation research.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the perceptions of observers who are informed of the proximal goals of instruction differ from those who are not so informed. Music education majors (N = 120) viewed one of three randomly assigned stimulus tapes. Each stimulus tape contained seven teaching episodes. Subjects wrote brief statements about their observations and rated the quality of the teaching while they watched each of the episodes. Half the subjects (n = 60) were informed of the instructional goals addressed in each of the episodes; the remaining subjects (n = 60) were not so informed. Observers' written statements were classified according to topic, depth, and evaluative quality. Subjects not informed of the instructional goals wrote significantly more teacher-directed, inferential, and positive statements than did the subjects who were informed of the instructional goals. In both observation conditions, 80% of the written observations pertained to the teachers, and only 14% pertained to the students. Subjects' mean ratings of teaching quality did not differ significantly between the observation conditions.

Scores obtained from the Intermediate Ear to Hand Test (Dickey & Froseth, 1991) were used to compare melodic-imitation and tone-quality scores between students who played the major instrument of their classroom instrumental music instructor and students who played a different instrument. Data were collected from 20 instrumental music classrooms that included eighth-grade students in the third year of instrumental music instruction. Students who played the major instrument of their instructor obtained statistically significant higher scores on overall performance quality when compared with students who did not, but the effect size was quite small, and there were no effects for the melodic-imitation or tone-quality components of overall performance quality.

Middle school and high school instrumentalists listened to 12 instrumental performances: four with no accompaniment, four with piano accompaniment, and four with compact disc accompaniment. Listeners (N = 188) judged the soloist's performance quality and indicated the performance's best feature and aspect needing most improvement. Listeners also rated their preference for each accompaniment. Materials were taken from popular beginning band method books. Results showed that accompaniment condition significantly affected performance quality ratings, with CD accompaniments rated highest and piano accompaniments lowest. Significant interactions revealed that younger students were swayed most by the accompaniment condition; certain popular music styles appeared most influential. There was a significant but modest relationship between greater preference for the accompaniment style and higher performance quality ratings. For preference, girls and boys responded significantly differently to the accompaniment styles. Overall, students consistently assigned the best feature and aspect needing most practice across accompaniment conditions.

We tested whether observers' perceptions of private lessons are affected by the type of verbalizations used by teachers to make corrections in student performance. We compared verbal corrections that were expressed as directive statements (i.e., specific directions to change some aspect of performance in a subsequent trial) and verbal corrections expressed as negative feedback statements (i.e., negative evaluations of student performance in a preceding performance trial). Participants viewed two videotaped private lessons. In one lesson, all corrections of student performance errors were expressed as directions to change some aspect of performance in the subsequent trial. In the other lesson, all corrections were expressed as negative feedback statements followed by a direction to play again. Subjects responded using a paper-and-pencil questionnaire with 10 statements about the teacher and student in each lesson. There were no meaningful differences in subjects' responses between the two lessons, both of which were rated highly positively. Asked to cite differences observed between the two lessons, few subjects identified any aspect of the teacher's feedback.