Thursday, October 14, 2010
Issues Paper
As you probably remember from class, I'm thinking of writing about the effect taking music classes out of school will have on children academically. I'm narrowing the topic to include only elementary school students, and only students who do not have private lessons outside of school. I will be measuring according to test scores, grades, and social interactions. To find my research, I will be typing words into the search engine like music, academic, elementary school, children, social interactions, etc. That's basically what I have so far.
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It sounds like you have done some good thinking about your topic. You may also focus on a type of lessons: piano, violin, etc.
ReplyDeleteYou could also try combining some of them, like elementary school and music or academic and music or children and music. I'm sure there are some studies done about this, it's a commonly used argument around music.
ReplyDeleteI think this idea is really interesting. My only question is about the "no lessons outside of school". My understanding was that most elementary music classes are required. Maybe you could either go with lessons outside of school, or you could look at right after elementary, focus on the students who continued with their music. Or you could look at attitudes during the class, but that may be difficult to assess. I don't know if that's universally true, but I know my school's music classes were required, the only thing that really differed was out attitude towards them and if we took clubs in them outside of class (like Orff).
Wow I'm impressed at the planning you've done, it makes me feel a little inferior and unprepared but that's okay. I think the results from this could be really impressive. The only thing I think will be hard is measuring emotion, like many people are joyful when they play music, so that is something the kids will be missing out on but there isn't a direct way to measure the effects of that.
ReplyDeleteI think the personality of the teacher has a HUGE effect on the music lesson experience. As a teacher I'm not very strict, and my students seem to enjoy lessons as a low-stress break from school. However, I've heard horror stories about cruel teachers who made music lessons a miserable experience. Just a thought. I think it sounds like a fascinating study, and I'd like to hear the results!
ReplyDeleteGreat topic! My only suggestion is that you be more specific in what you put in the search engines. You can use things like quotation marks and astericks to narrow your search. Also, lots of sights have a "refined search" option with things like, "with this but NOT that" or "this, this, OR this," etc.
ReplyDeleteI agree with bookkeeper; It is a great idea, you just need to be more specific with how you search. I think it would be very interesting to see the correlation between taking music classes and how well you do in different areas.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great topic and I honestly wish I would have thought of it. I love how indepth you have thought of your topic. I'm definitely be interested.
ReplyDeletePromising paper. Since you are not creating your own research, you might need to adapt your paper to what you find. There should be plenty of data out there.
ReplyDelete