This study was designed to fill a need to explore the hypothesis that students who participate in middle school bands and or chorus have higher math cognitive functioning than their non-music peers. Using the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP), this study identified specific math domains that middle school music students showed higher functioning…

Despite music education being endorsed by researchers as an effective tool to improve the social-emotional competence of students who live in poverty, African American students, who are overrepresented among the population of students who live in poverty, often fail to take advantage of music education programs (Elpus & Abril, 2011; Hoffman…

Music educators strive diligently to develop musically literate student musicians. Sight-reading new music is one way of displaying music literacy because musicians must simultaneously synthesize an understanding of music notation and technical performance skills. Teaching students to sight-read is important towards developing an independent…

The purpose of this study was to describe the development of a valid and reliable rubric to assess secondary-level solo instrumental music performance based on principles of invariant measurement. The research questions that guided this study included (1) What is the psychometric quality (i.e., validity, reliability, and precision) of a scale…

Keeping one's self inspired in the music classroom is all about connections. Sometimes educators need to look at what they're doing from a different perspective. Luckily, there's no shortage of ways to revitalize one's classroom approach, and to help the author explores a few, he made use of some connections of his own, turning to five educators…

A key issue for string education advocates is the growth of orchestra programs in schools and communities where participants are engaged in learning and performing. There is a need to discover what is personally meaningful to string students so that successful programs can be developed. The purpose of this two-part study was to examine grade 6-12…

This article describes Training 2012 Conference & Expo which began with a bang and finished with a splash--literally. The Drum Cafe got participants' blood pumping with rhythmic tribal music early in the morning on the first day of the conference, February 13, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. The drum leader established the…

A comparative analysis was used to study the results from a descriptive survey of selected middle school students in Grades 6, 7, and 8. Student responses to the survey tool was used to compare multiple variables of music participation and duration of various musical activities, such as singing and performing on instruments, to the mathematics…