Songwriting has been used in music therapy for decades to help address trauma, alleviate depression and build confidence in both children and adults. With components that great music education models point to--composition, agency, collaboration, and means for self-expression, songwriting seems to be a useful tool for music educators as well. Yet,…

This design case describes how the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) informed the development of SpectrumPlay, a digital tool created to support learning and instruction of elementary music literacy and composition in inclusive music classrooms. The learning supports embedded in the tool enable students with visual processing…

The presence of popular music education in schools has expanded significantly in the past two decades within the United States in part due to the expansion of modern band programming. Initially developed and propagated by the non-profit organization Little Kids Rock (LKR), modern band is a term used to describe school-based ensembles that use…

Mental training has been employed successfully by experienced musicians, but rarely explored with younger learners. Considering its benefits, however, including the use and development of predictive, feedforward processes, identified in neuroscience as being central to playing a musical instrument, this mixed qualitative-quantitative study…

This article reports on a case study in a Norwegian primary school where nearly 50 fifth-grade pupils took part in a creative music-making project. Facilitated by two professional artists, they created an original piece of music and performed their composition for an audience at the end of the project week. A substantial part of the data consisted…

The purpose of this study was to investigate song teaching approaches and their effect on the singing accuracy of third grade elementary students using an original song with no repeated phrases. Students (N = 318) and teachers (N = 22) were from a large school district in the Western United States with a diverse demographic population. Three song…

The development of creative processes within the framework of music and dance constitutes an opportunity to promote and integrate learning from different subject areas. In these activities, the moments of knowledge transfer between the different parts of the curriculum emerge as key moments in the process. This article identifies and analyses the…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether an experimental programme, based on interdisciplinary interactions between music education and history and the implementation of arts and cultural education objectives, could influence pupils' interest in Western classical music of the 20th century. The programme was designed on the basis…

Feedback plays an essential role in music education, helping individuals learn to consider creative works from multiple perspectives. In this article, we explore the Critical Response Process, a four-step process for engaging with artistic works in progress. Founded on the principle that both artists and responders play active roles in feedback,…

iPads are becoming increasingly prevalent in schools and offer significant potential as both a compositional and pedagogical tool in general music classes. In this article, I discuss a composition activity that I implemented with general primary/elementary music classes in Australia. This activity involved using iPads, namely the apps iMovie and…

The purpose of this study is to examine guitar tablature as a strategy to facilitate student-led learning in order to contribute to liberation of music students in the elementary setting. This researcher seeks to understand the effect it has on beginning guitar students in elementary school and what role, if any, it should take in an elementary…

The development of new music technologies necessitates changes in the content of music education. Musical pedagogy is faced with the task of educating creative musicians who are capable of innovative activities and inventive musical thinking. Therefore, primary music education should introduce creative learning technologies aimed at developing…

This study examines group robotics' impacts on elementary students' attitudes toward music, attitudes toward group work, and music composition when they are composing music via a robotics platform in collaborative and cooperative groups. One hundred ninety-one students in fourth and fifth grades completed the music composing project over the…

This article describes a project in which contemporary music is studied and created in primary-school classrooms in the presence of a composer. Listening to and analyzing a composer's works fosters musical creation processes in students, who subsequently present and discuss their works in a meeting with the composer. Finally, the students' works…

Improvisation is an area of interest to both music education researchers and music educators alike. The purpose of this literature review was to examine extant studies related to improvisation at the elementary level. Selected research included the nature of improvisation, the amount of instructional time and activity type used, the development of…