Music uniting school, youth and communities through information technologies: an evaluation

Music Uniting Schools, Youth, and Communities through Information Technologies (MUSYCIT) is an innovative, multidisciplinary, three-year program offered to students in grades 5-8 in Schools of Distance Education and small rural schools in Queensland, Australia. Students conduct an oral history interview, reinterpret this as a lyric, and compose a melody to that lyric using computer software in a cognitive apprenticeship model through mentoring by experts via the Internet. This paper reports findings associated 14 students who were involved in the program. Data came from a Likert-scale questionnaire, a semi-structured interview, and student E-mails. The findings reveal general student satisfaction with MUSYCIT and the mentoring process (although there were some concerns about the difficulty of wording and explanation in some E-mails), a sense of achievement and ownership after creating the lyrics and melody and an overall desire to continue with the program