Many music teachers, myself included, shudder when we hear the phrase "music education research." Our brains instantly conjure images of endless nights in the library in undergrad, reading article after article, desperately attempting to make sense of it all and blindly hoping for a good grade on the assignment.
Fortunately, music education research does not have to be so intimidating, frustrating, and overwhelming. Research is simply (as stated in the video for this week's module) finding a question to ask, asking the question by designing a study, measuring the results, analyzing the measurements, and telling others what was found. It is simply the application of the scientific method to topics in music education. With a step-by-step method in place, music teachers should not need to feel anxious about research.
Research is a vital part of the music teaching experience. Research helps to find answers to questions about music education (such as, "Why aren't my students getting this?"), it expands the knowledge base of the teacher for new methods or ideas, and it satisfies intellectual curiosity (such as "What if I tried this with my kids?").
In addition, experienced music teachers should realize that they already do research regularly in their classrooms. Anytime a music teacher experiments with a new lesson plan or unit, listens to the performances of his or her students, and evaluates student assessments, he or she is researching. To make it formal, the music teacher simply needs to apply the scientific method, as stated above. This type of research that regularly occurs in the classroom can be known as "action research." According to Mertler, action research is a particularly useful form of research for a music teacher, as it allows teachers to directly design improvements and customize their own professional development into focused efforts. There is always some way to improve music teaching, and action research allows a process to do so.
There are several types of publications in music education that can assist the teacher in researching. According to Phillips, the four types of publications for research in music education and music therapy are research handbooks, research journals in hard copy, online journals, and dissertations and masters theses. In the text, Phillips lists specific publications in each category and where to easily access them.
In addition, Phillips lists research genres as historical, philosophical, and behavior/empirical. He states that there is far less music education research in the historical and philosophical genres, while nearly all of the current research falls within the behavior/empirical genre. Phillips also categorized research information by quantitative (pertaining to numbers), qualitative (pertaining to data from observations and truths found naturally), and mixed methods (both quantitative and qualitative at the same time). He classified quantitative into sub-categories of non-experimental, where there is no cause and effect, which were further classified into the categories of descriptive and correlational, and he classified experimental, where there is cause and effect, into four sub-categories: true-experimental, quasi-experimental, causal-comparative, and meta-analysis. Qualitative was classified into six sub-categories: narrative (people's lives through stories), phenomenology (essence of human experience), ethnography (related to culture), grounded theory (related to theories that are grounded in the views of the participants), case study (a single study over an extended period of time), and action (events without formal research design that include trial and error). Mixed methods research can be sequential, concurrent, or transformative.
Most interestingly, this week's readings included an article titled "Five Misconceptions about Scientific Research in Music Education." The misconceptions described myths that many teachers believe about research in music education, including that the research topics would not be interesting to music educators, the scientific study of music takes away from the "magic," some things in music cannot be measured by research, research experiments are irrelevant because they are nothing like a real-life music classroom, and statistics are useless because they can be manipulated to prove anything. For the most part, I did not previously believe the myths about research, but I found myself drawn to misconception number 4: "The artificial environment of a research experiment is nothing like a real-life music classroom." I have often believed this statement to be true; my classroom is incredibly diverse, and often I find that my students are either far too smart for suggested methods to be meaningful to them, or they are completely lost when I try to incorporate the methods. I believed that research experiments were so carefully regulated that they could never apply in my diverse classroom. I am looking forward, after seeing the myth debunked, to discovering ways to apply some of the methods that I previously overlooked because of this misconception.
In conclusion, I look forward to diving in to music education research and discovering new and meaningful ways to incorporate both formal research and action research in my music classroom. I believe these concepts can shape and improve my teaching. The concepts will influence my effectiveness so that students are receiving the best possible music education, and there is nothing to fear about that.
