The effect of active and passive listening condition on young children's musical understanding of familiar and unfamiliar melody through researcher-invented notation

UnrestrictedThis study examined the effect of active and passive listening conditions on young children’s musical understanding of familiar and unfamiliar melody through researcher-invented notation.; All subjects in this study were Korean children from 3 to 5 years of age in a private prekindergarten in Seoul, Korea. A pre- and posttest experimental design guided this study, which was conducted for five consecutive weeks, including three treatment sessions between pre- and posttest sessions in summer of 2009.; The following research questions for the study were posed: 1) Is there a significant difference in young children’s apparent understanding of tempo when comparing active and passive listening conditions? and 2) Is there a significant difference in young children’s apparent understanding of tempo according to familiarity of the melody?; Listening conditions (independent variable) in this study were the presence or absence of body movement while children listened to short musical examples. The children’s apparent musical understanding of tempo (dependent variable) was captured through children’s guided drawings that indicated where they understood tempo changes to occur in the music. The drawings were evaluated by three independent judges who scored the number of accurate tempo changes indicated in the drawings. Three judges scored four drawings for each child: for familiar and unfamiliar melodies in both the pre- and posttest.; A two-way ANOVA was used to analyze the scores. The results revealed that there is no statistically significant difference between treatment and control groups, between familiar and unfamiliar melody, and no difference with the interaction of group and melody familiarity. Therefore, the null hypotheses for this study were accepted