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The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of gender, choral membership, and ethnicity on students’ attitudes toward singing, choral participation, and future choral enrollment in the urban context. Participants were 4th and 5th grade students (N=600), both chorus and non-chorus members from a convenience sample of four public urban elementary schools in a school district in the Southeastern United States. A researcher-modified version of Mizener’s (1990) questionnaire on singing interest and choral participation was employed. Through a Cronbach's alpha reliability analysis, the survey yielded satisfactory alpha coefficients (George & Mallery, 2010); attitudes toward singing (α = .82), and attitudes toward choral participation (α = .75). To ensure that my survey was a valid measure, I employed items from Mizener’s questionnaire with the same participant age group (elementary-school students).Data were analyzed using a three-way multivariate analysis of variance, which indicated that gender and choral membership and their interaction terms accounted for significant differences in the set of dependent variables. Moreover, the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient revealed positive associations among the three outcome measures (p ≤ .025). Although the results did not identify ethnicity as a factor accounting for statistically significant differences in the dependent variables, ancillary analyses pointed to tentative evidence that ethnicity impacted attitudes toward choral participation among chorus students. African American students tended to have less favorable attitudes toward choral participation than students of other ethnicities. Yet, Hispanics was the ethnic group with the lowest choral participation rate among surveyed students (37.4%; n=52 of 139 surveyed). Implications for music education practice include teachers’ acknowledgement of the role of gender and the implementation of strategies to disrupt gender stereotypes, a redefinition of singing as a socially and culturally constructed behavior, acknowledgement of students’ musical interests and practices and, thus, implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy.
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