Presents lessons from," Strategies for Teaching High School General Music." The lessons are designed to incorporate requirements from Standard Three, Improvising, of the National Standards for Music Education. The lessons include objectives, materials procedures, indicators of success, and follow-up procedures. (MJP)

Believes that music teachers should reassess their views toward adolescent behavior in the music classroom by learning to see their behavior in a positive light. Describes teaching strategies that build on four adolescent behaviors: (1) desire for peer acceptance; (2) abundant energy; (3) love of fun; and (4) limited time-managing skills. (CMK)

Provides guidelines for choral directors who are choosing and adapting music for middle school singers (grades 4 through 9). Discusses three types of ensembles (treble, mixed, and tenor/bass choirs) in which the voicing is appropriate to the adolescent voice. Includes a selected repertoire for middle school choral groups. (CMK)

Contends that by providing adolescent males with opportunities to interact with other males who sing will help them perceive singing as a male activity. Describes a program that enables boys to interact with other male singers called "A Workshop for Boy Singers." (CMK)

Reviews the research on sightsinging instruction and achievement in the secondary choral ensemble and the variables related to student success at both the group and individual level. Explains that research on instructional time, methods, materials, and achievement will be divided into descriptive and predictive studies. (CMK)

Explores the choral sound preferences and perceptions of choristers and auditors focusing on the effects of using different choral formations and types of spacing between singers and rows of singers. Suggests that choir spacing made a greater contribution to choral sound preferences of both auditors and choristers than did formation. (CMK)

Describes an activity designed to develop middle school choral students' writing skills: students wrote letters to the composers or arrangers of pieces they had performed at concerts; the students could address topics such as their reaction to the piece, general questions about composing, or discussing the performance of the piece. (CMK)

Examines the effect of repeated trials on children aged six to nine from different countries learning a new song. States that: (1) culture influences responses; (2) rote singing improves with age; (3) girls responses are better; and (4) children repeat rhythms more accurately before they can pitch match melodic contours and precise pitches. (CMK)

Examines the relationship between childrens scores on a standardized test of musical aptitude, Gordons Primary Measures of Music Audiation, and their performance on specific musical tasks. Suggests a need for a type of test that provides a broader perspective of childrens musical abilities, since there is no correlation between the test and tasks.…

Focuses on traditional music ensembles (orchestra, bands, and choir) discussing such issues as the affects of block scheduling and how to deal with scheduling issues, the effects of funding on large ensemble programs, nontraditional ensembles in music programs, and trying to teach the National Standards for Music Education within a large ensemble.…

In the mid-1960s, the foundations of Participatory Research were being laid in Tanzania and around the world through the work of muckraking adult educators--President Julius Nyerere, Marja-Liisa Swantz, Orlando Fals Borda, Rajesh Tandon, Budd Hall and many more of their friends and colleagues. At the same time, a bunch of American kids were over…

The article reports on a one-year AHRB-funded Innovations project that was designed to evaluate the usefulness, or otherwise, of the application of real-time visual feedback technology in the singing studio. The basis for the research was a multi-disciplinary approach that drew on voice science and acoustics, the psychology of singing and voice…

Songs provide easy access to other cultures. Songs generate instinctive responses to the mood and rhythm in music, even if the meaning is initially unknown. To stimulate curiosity about other cultures, the author had her third and fourth grade students listen to a recording of a Navajo and a Franco-Canadian song and then create a bas-relief clay…

The study assessed the effectiveness of a musical programme at reducing anti-dark-skinned stereotyping among light-skinned Portuguese children aged 7-10 years, as measured through the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure II (Williams et al., 1975). The programme consisted of introducing a sub-series of Cape Verdean songs into the series of regular…

One of the central concepts in Vygotsky's theory of child development is the Zone of Proximal Development. This article identifies how Jack moves through the Zone of Proximal Development in two areas of his musical development, vocal improvisation and song acquisition, from the ages of 24 to 36 months, with scaffolding provided by me, his father.…