Close listening, perhaps the most important skill in music education is seldom practiced in the 21 st century. The ability to listen, understand, communicate, and interpret what you hear is central to education in general and transferable to many life situations and modes of communication. For this reason, listening is the primary focus of most first year post-secondary music history courses. It is also one of the most challenging skills to teach in large classroom formats. To address these challenges, we developed a blended delivery approach to support recognition, comprehension, and communication of musical materials. Based on the literature on music cognition and Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) Representational Redescription Model (RR Model) of knowledge acquisition, we designed a cognitive framework to support the design of enhanced listening models. This paper describes the results of a pilot project which presented the students with selfpaced on-line listening activities followed by a virtual listening/discussion session with peers. Both activities were well-received by the students and level of music experience was not associated with students' perceived value of the activities, indicating that students with varied backgrounds found the activities useful. The results support our cognitive framework as a foundation for technologicallyenhanced listening activities for postsecondary music courses.
This study is an extension of previous research on the infusion of technology into a postsecondary music course to promote the skill of close-listening of music. Due to many in-class hindrances (e.g., time, equipment, acoustics, class size) students in postsecondary music courses do not often experience quality listening opportunities to be able to detect important musical elements. For this study, we developed on-line, supplemental listening activities using Articulate Storyline, Adobe Connect and the virtual world OpenSim. We pretested students on music experience, computer experience and level of self-regulation. At the end of the course, students answered a survey on their enjoyment, tendency to recommend, engagement, perceived increase in understanding of material and whether the activities were worthwhile. In a comparison of 2014 and 2015 results, we found that students with high selfregulation levels rated the above items more positively when the content included more advanced musical concepts. In addition, we found that students who interacted with the supplemental on-line activities and materials achieved higher grades than those who did not. Students who accessed the comprehensive on-line activities close to when the material was presented in class performed better than those who waited until exam time.
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