Article Summaries

Taylor, D.M. Refining Learned Repertoire for Percussion Instruments in an Elementary Setting.
Parts of this research article stress the importance of positive modeling for your students and this helps support that good demonstration is an important part of performance education. It also mentions how concrete objectives after negative feedback that students were more likely to succeed.

Duke, R. A., Empirical description of the pace of music instruction.
From this article I learned that presenting information in a fast-paced perspective is more effective.

Yarbrough, C. The effect of observation focus on evaluations of choral rehearsal excerpts.
In this article I learned that to be an effective choral teacher (and instrumental) you need to be able to focus on the score and make contact with the members of your ensemble as well. This research also mentioned that the three hardest things to get a new teacher to understand are student attentiveness, positive reinforcement, and pacing in the lesson.

Yarbrough, C. The evaluation of teaching in choral rehearsals.
This research article recommends that you keep instructions brief in the choral classroom, this way it leaves more time to the students to perform and rehearse. It also mentions how that students may forgive inaccuracies by a director if the director has a fun or pleasing style of teaching.

Price, H. E. Relationships among Conducting Quality, Ensemble Performance Quality, and State Festival Ratings.
With festival judging, the research showed that more attention was based on the more technical aspects like eye contact, head position, beat clarity, and beat pattern rather than on intonation, ensemble, and tone quality. Basically, it seems like the judges paid more attention to the actions of the conductor instead of the quality of the choir or ensemble.

VanWeelden, K. Relationships between perceptions of conducting effectiveness and ensemble performance.
This article showed that posture and facial expression are crucial in effective conducting. The results showed that conductors with more facial expressions and better posture yield higher results with their ensembles. The research also showed that the amount of eye contact used did not really affect the performance and participation of the students.

Davis, A. P. Performance achievement and analysis of teaching during choral rehearsals.
This study showed that as the students became better at the music they were working on, the teacher used more nonverbal communication then before. It also showed that choirs beginning a new piece usually required more verbal communication and guidance in general; and as choirs became more familiar with the piece they paid more attention to what the conductor is doing.

The article that I found the most use out of was Duke’s Empirical description of the pace of music instruction. I thought it was interesting how the time spent with teacher/communication and the amount of time each spend engaged in the class helps student performance. This will definitely impact how I write my lessons and how I plan to teach. It’s good advice that I will keep in mind when I get out into the teaching world

I found reading these research articles was challenging and confusing at times. The basic, overall concept of each article was useful, but to me sometimes that got lost in all of the big words and statistics that didn’t make sense to me. I spent of majority of my time rereading the articles just so that I could remember what the main focus was again and pick out what they were trying to get across.

I did find the overall information in the articles useful, and I would like to find out more on how pacing a lesson helps or hinders the students’ learning capabilities. However, I’m not sure if I would turn to the JRME every time to read on that subject. I think other journal articles summarizes studies like this would work just as well.