What I Learned - Week 8

What I learned – Week 8

Research in music education is such a broad topic.  How do we tackle so much information in such a short amount of time? Quickly, that’s how!

I found this class overwhelming a lot of the time.  I think a lot of that comes from my uneasiness with reading and being able to fully comprehend everything quickly.  This uneasiness dates back to well before high school.  However, I appreciated the way the assignments prepared us for each subsequent task.  

Taking the time to review one single research article early on in the course gave me the opportunity to learn how to break down an article and find the relevant information.  After the second article, I felt more confident as to how to read these articles for literature reviews later on in the course.

After my assessment class earlier this term, I felt very comfortable with the prospect of analyzing data.  I was well aware and comfortable with the concepts of mean, median, mode, standard deviation, variance, and correlation coefficient.  I still feel as though I need more training and information on how to code qualitative data as opposed to quantitative, which is clearly provided as necessary.  

My initial review of literature and research topic that I discussed at length with my classmates involved the effect of online music courses and brick & mortar school music program enrollment.  I found precious little literature on the topic and that cause me some frustration.  However, I do not think that the lack of significant research means the topic is not worth studying.  I think that because online music education is so new, there has not been sufficient time for appropriate studies to be conducted.  I think that as the years progress and virtual schooling becomes more commonplace, research on music in particular will become more prevalent

Working on my research proposal was eye opening.  I chose music performance anxiety because I, myself, have suffered from MPA for years.  I have also watched my students have panic attacks minutes prior to a performance due to anxiety.  As music educators, I think that this is a crucial topic to continue to research.  

The texts were very relevant to the material we were learning.   I appreciated the way the Phillips text was written from time to time.  It had almost a “play by play” aspect to each phase of research.  The text was very beneficial to me and my understanding of some of the key concepts.

Something I would like to have much more information on is the actual survey design process.  I think that this is a vital part of research in music education.  I found a major flaw in my own survey for my Research Etude.  Several of the questions that I asked had absolutely no relevance to the data I was collecting.  It wasn’t until I was collecting and coding my data that I discovered this mistake.   My classmates provided great feedback on my survey, but they missed this information as well.  I feel as though a more well designed survey would have yielded more valuable results.  

The topic of how to research is so vast and I feel as though this course only scratched the surface of what we need to know as budding educators.  This course had so much information in it that I would have preferred to see a 16 week /6 credit hour design, rather than 8 weeks /3 credit hours.  I would just be beginning to grasp some of the concepts and then it would be time to move on to the next.  I am not yet confident or knowledgeable enough to conduct my own survey, or design a questionnaire, or interpret results, but thanks to this class, I’m a little bit closer.