Important Music Eduaction : A study about student perceptions concerning the music subject in lower secondary school

The aim of this study is to discover student perceptions concerning the music subject with regards to what they more or less important to learn. The methods used to achieve this can be described as an online survey which is sent out to three participating schools. This produces quantitative as well as qualitative data that is analyzed with influences from the phenomenographic theory. The results focus on identifying variations in student perceptions which describes how theoretical knowledge (music theory, the history of music, the impact that music can have on humans) is considered by the students to be more important than practical knowledge (learning to play musical instruments, learning to sing, composing and creating music). The survey also let students give suggestions to potential changes to the subject in order to make it feel more important to each individual. These suggestions reveal that an extensive part of the students wish to include more practical elements while only small groups suggest increasing the number of theoretical elements in music education. This leads us to believe that student perceptions about what is important to learn does not necessarily coincides with what they want the music subject to contain.