New report on the benefits of instrumental learning
It was good to see this report covered on the BBC website late last week. To my knowledge, the FMS has commissioned the first piece of evaluative work into the Wider Opportunities programme. It is an interesting study and well worth a read (although I can’t find the full report on the FMS website yet).
In some senses, there are no surprises here at all. The report endorses the Wider Opportunities approach to instrumental learning, even hinting that whole class tuition is as effective as small group tuition. On second thoughts, perhaps I should have been surprised by that if I reflect back over the longer term of instrumental teaching in schools?
Obviously, I’m a firm advocate for the benefits of a music education for all children. But I do worry that pieces of research/evaluation like this sometimes over-step the mark. I’m really not sure that claims about pupils’ self-esteem being raised through participating in Wider Opportunities, and the benefits that this has on their wider studies, can be validated in what seems like a short-scale evaluative study. Surely a longitudinal study of some sort is needed for that? But, the research seems to have been funded by the FMS, Yamaha and other musical groups so perhaps its findings are not that suprising. The key recommendations made be laugh out loud. What do you make of this selection:
1.2 Planning and programming of WO should be more open to input and decision making from children; Why?
2.5 Continued financial and resource commitment to schools and music services is needed to meet the rapid growth in demand for WO music provisions; No surprise there! Nothing like having a bit of research to back up your claim for more money from an ever-decreasing pot.
3.4 Strategic targeting towards broader improvement in initial teacher education for class teachers; Easy to have a pop at classroom teachers. We’ve seen that before fairly recently.
3.5 Encouraging greater parity of training and pay and conditions across music services; In other words, lets pay unqualified instructors the same as qualified teachers. After all, what’s the difference?
Bit cynical? Maybe. What do others think?
I guess i’m a bit cynical as well. I have only skimmed over the full report, but i’m not sure the claims they make can be validated to the point that says “hey…this really DOES work”. My first thought was the time needed (as you mentioned) to compile the data (7 months?).
I also did not see any theories of learning. My graduate training is in development and learning (a.k.a Learning Sciences) and I didn’t see anything other than “[i]t also appeared that constructivist learning was encouraged by learning in a group and the overall skill level of individual children was lifted by learning in a group context” (p. 86). But i saw nothing about an explanation of constructivist theory (there are, as you might expect, differing opinions as to what constitutes constructivism).
Another area of interest to me is motivation. Again, their claims that children were more motivated to learn an instrument because of WO is a bit ‘thin’. Motivation has many constructs associated to it (e.g., self-efficacy, situated motivation, intrinsic vs. extrinsic, etc.) and i think the claims need to be backed up by one or more of these constructs.
I look forward to reading over this with more focus, but those are my initial thoughts.
Mike
1 Feb 10 at 1:12 pm
Thanks for those comments Mike. Really interesting to get your perspective. Where did you find the full report?
Jonathan
1 Feb 10 at 3:31 pm
http://www.thefms.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/iawo-complete-and-final-rosis-amendments270110.pdf
Mike
1 Feb 10 at 5:19 pm
Thank you for the link Jonathan and the comments from Mike – very stimulating as my knowledge of learning theories is rather rusty. On a separate note I would like to know what will be done in terms of KS3 funding. So much has been targetted at KS2 now for a few years and we are seeing increased numbers of instrumentalists coming through at KS3 – are there plans for a funding push here too?
David House
1 Feb 10 at 7:36 pm
Not to my knowledge David. I think it is highly likely that any funding for existing musical initiatives will dry up too. We have seen a period of significant funding for music education but my bet is that it won’t continue, whoever comes to power in May. Dick Hallam has some interesting thoughts on this on the Teaching Music website. He is probably closest to the decisions about these types of things.
Jonathan Savage
2 Feb 10 at 8:53 am