This study examined secondary band directors' practices and attitudes about accommodating students with cognitive or behavioral exceptionalities in middle and high school band programs. The research questions were: 1. What are band directors' practices for including students with cognitive or behavioral exceptionalities in a middle or high school…

Lowel Mason highlights the importance of integrating music learning into the curriculum alongside other fundamental skills such as reading, promoting his belief in the transformative power of music education and its impact on child development. Mason stated, "Children must be taught music as they are taught to read" (Pemberton, 1992).…

The curriculum used in amateur and professional piano education is shaped according to the physical and mental state of the students. Easy access to piano literature that can be used in case of one hand and/or one arm disability is important in terms of contributing to the students and piano instructors. For this reason, it is aimed to determine…

The aim of this study is to determine the social skill levels of high school students according to their participation in musical activities. Social skills are important in all stages of an individual's development, but due to physical and mental changes in high school years when adolescence is intensely experienced, the individual may have…

This study tested the effect of the motor learning paradigm of internal and external focus of attention (FOA) with middle school band students. A total of 56 second-year band students (woodwinds n = 28; valved brass n = 18; trombones n = 10) practiced isochronous, alternating pitch patterns (e.g., eighth notes C-A-C-A-C-A-C) in three conditions:…

Secondary general music is hard to define. For some, this denotes an accelerated version of elementary general music or a decelerated version of a college music appreciation course. Others view this as any nontraditional ensemble geared for middle or high school students, such as guitar, keyboard, or steel pans. Still, for others, secondary…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a beginning jazz improvisation learning environment for middle school instrumentalists, including whether one of two instructional sequences of harmonic form improvisation tasks better supported four outcomes: achievement, self-assessment, self-efficacy, and motivation. Over 12…

Despite music education being endorsed by researchers as an effective tool to improve the social-emotional competence of students who live in poverty, African American students, who are overrepresented among the population of students who live in poverty, often fail to take advantage of music education programs (Elpus & Abril, 2011; Hoffman…

Musical composition is widely considered to be a fundamental component of good musicianship. Recent state and national standards make it clear that preservice music teachers will be expected to include the teaching of musical composition in their curricula when they enter the field. The purpose of this study was to investigate the integration of…

In two experiments we examined the extent to which musicians identify discrepancies between their intentions and their playing during individual practice. In the first experiment, 60 musicians representing four levels of skill development practiced a familiar piece from their own repertoire for 5 min while being audio recorded. They then listened…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of tonic drone accompaniment on the intonation of violinists and violists. Twenty-eight middle and high school students performed an ascending diatonic line and a descending dominant 7th arpeggio on the violin or viola in three trials: pretest, posttest accompanied with drone, and posttest…

This article presents an experiment with a group of secondary school music students in Spain. We used music score sheets enriched with Quick Response codes as a resource for the practice required to play a musical instrument. The first group (n = 56) was compared with another group (n = 56) that used traditional resources (textbooks and compact…

I surveyed inservice instrumental music educators (N = 96) to determine their comfort level for teaching and performing on secondary band instruments. Research questions included the following: (1) How comfortable do inservice music educators feel teaching and performing on secondary instruments?; (2) Does grade level affect educators' comfort…

This action research study utilized a quasi-experimental design to examine the effect of research-based music classroom assessment techniques on the students' performance in flute recorder education of one group using the pre-test and post-test design. The study used a purposive sampling of 30 eighth grade junior high school students from the…

Jazz has been a familiar element of secondary music curricula in the United States since the late 1960s (Worthy 2013). Yet, as broader social dialogue addresses equity and justice concerning gender and sexuality, secondary instrumental jazz education remains underrepresented in those discussions. Pressures to conform to heteronormative notions and…