REPORT OF THE RESEARCH PROGRAM OF THE KODÁLY MUSICAL TRAINING INSTITUTE
USA, May 1971
My responsibilities to the Kodály Musical Training Institute for the academic year 1970-71 took into consideration three primary tasks.
First, I was involved in putting the Kodály method to practical use as a teacher in the Taft Elementary School in Boston.
Second, it was necessary to test the musical abilities of the children at the outset of their instruction by the Kodály method, as well as to devise tests which measured their progress during the course of instruction.
Third, was the task of building a program for musical research as well as a system for evaluation of the effect of the teaching method with the children for use in successive years.
Teaching in the Taft School:
The classes I taught were under the direction of the traditional Boston school system in an old, quite obsolete building. In comparison with a suburban school, like Needham’s, the Taft school has heating problems in winter and cooling problems in hot weather because they can neither control the radiators in the classroom nor open enough windows. The seats are fixed to the floor. There is no water tap in the classrooms, which would make it easier to use water paints. Water paints were not used and there was no designated art teacher. The school is over-crowded.
There isn’t any room for individual work of any kind or testing, and consultation. I badly needed a room for making individual tapings during the school year when sudden musical progress would occur. This school was also sorely in need of technical equipment which seemed no problem in the suburban schools.
Most of the children attending the Taft School came from low income families and about 30% from families on welfare. Quite a high percentage of the children did not speak English when they first enrolled or they spoke English only as a second language. In “A” class we had four Chinese children, one Japanese, and one Iranian. In “B” class there were 2 Greeks, one Cuban, and two black boys with a very poor understanding of English.
I started in October to teach the „A” class (Mrs. Sullivan’s) and visited the parallel „B” class (Miss Cavallaro’s). Before teaching, we tested the children in both classes and I wrote a report on my first observations of every child. This was the musical test I will describe later. I visited ten lessons with both classroom teachers to be able to observe the teachers’ attitudes and the children’s behavior. It was obvious from the very beginning that Miss Cavallaro kept strict discipline. She had taught in a ghetto school for twenty years and she was very proud of her disciplinary and academic success in this school. Mrs. Sullivan’s attitude toward the children was rather soft and mother-like. She let them move somewhat more freely. She, like Miss Cavallaro, taught them not to speak out during the lessons but this restriction was not as enforced.
According to the first agreement with the Institute, I visited and evaluated Mrs. Robbins’ music lessons in the “B” class and she visited my lessons in the parallel “A” class until November. Mrs. Robbins was a candidate in the Kodály Training Programs. This was changed, however, so that I visited Mrs. Robbins’ music lessons but I did not evaluate them. Later I was asked to suspend my observations until February, although she still visited my classes. In February Mrs. Robbins reported to the Institute that she did not wish to continue in the Kodály Training program. I then had to take over her music lessons for the “B” class. Mrs. Robbins, for personal reasons, was unable to cope with her duties in the Institute. This placed a burden on my work as well as others’ in the Institute.
When I took on the extra class, I was unable to find any of Mrs. Robbins’ lesson plans. She had also refused to make a video tape of a lesson. The one-page report on the musical progress accomplished in five months gave me only titles of the songs that were learned and the types of the musical elements worked on, nothing further.
Soon after I started to teach in “B” class, I discovered that the preparation and reinforcement periods were insufficient. The children could not play singing games. They still had personal conflicts in games (pushing each other, squeezing each other’s hands, etc.). They did not walk in the same tempo - nor did they feel the rhythm of the songs.
A third of the children did not know the songs mentioned in Mrs. Robbins’ report, and they obviously did not enjoy singing. They used their voices badly, singing loudly and harshly because three out-of-tune children usually screamed and destroyed the sound of the group. In sharpest contrast to the “A” class, children in the “B” class had no independence or initiative to organize their own group activities. The lack of the children’s awareness of music as an experience of the senses as well as of the mind, and the obvious fact that the musical elements had not been successfully reinforced, presented problems of teaching method which were instructive to study. The comparison between the two parallel classes made it possible to study the behavior of the children in the two groups, each having different musical and educational preparation. The development of the children in “A” class will be analyzed from my notes, tapes, and video- tapes from the point of view of musical skills as well as of the attitudes of the individual children.
Musical Test:
We tested the musical ability of the children in seven Kodály classes:
2 classes in Needham - High Rock Elementary School
2 classes in Brighton - Taft Elementary School
3 classes in Boston - Agassiz Elementary School
and 3 control classes.
Eva Rozgonyi tested four classes in South Hadley. The test was devised by us because there is no musical test for this early age (my information was confirmed by Dr. R. Petzold, a researcher at Wisconsin University).
We tested the children individually. The test consisted of six parts:
1) melodic perception, that is, the ability to repeat given melodies on first hearing;
2) learning a melody, that is, the ability to sing back a melody after hearing and repeating it three times;
3) reproduction of aurally produced rhythmic patterns;
4) discrimination between two tempi;
5) discrimination between two dynamics;
6) discrimination between two timbres.
The first, second, and third parts of the test were taped at the first examination. I evaluated the ten tapes, recorded the results of the tests taken by the 235 children and computed the average statistics for the end of November.
Further mathematical analysis will be made by Mr. M. Novey, a graduate psychologist, after finishing the second period of testing. Consulting with Dr. Nichols and Mr. Novey, we will be able to refine these tests in the second period (May and June 1971). In addition to the musical test, we will also administer three psychological tests that examine the following areas:
1) vocabulary
2) memory & comprehension
3) matching familiar figures
We will need a music specialist - independent from our staff - for evaluating and analyzing data of musical tests made in South Hadley, and for making a comparison with a sample of my previously evaluated tapes. Mr. Stephen Schmidt, a student of musicology at Harvard College, is a candidate for such objective evaluation. We need further consultations with music psychologists as well as with Kodály teachers (preferably during the summer course) concerning the method of musical testing.
The next problem to be solved is how to measure the musical achievement attained by the special method we use in Kodály classes. We will be able to use standard musical ability tests with older aged children but we can hardly measure their achievement in music skills with these tests. For further information, I suggest involving as many musical and control groups as possible. Mrs. E. Moll in Pittsburgh, Miss M. McNamara in New Haven, Miss A. Osborn in Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada), and Miss J. Ribiére-Raverlat in Montreal could give some of these tests to their first grade groups according to my instructions in 1971-72.
We know the work of these music teachers well, as each instructor spent one or more years in Hungary in serious study of the Kodály method. I would consider tests given by them to be reliable indicators of the children’s musical ability. The data of so many variations of music teachers, classroom teachers, school systems and children will be useful for later analysis. The analysis and further consultations can help us to create a reliable and valid musical test, suitable for correct measurement of musical achievement attained by the Kodály method.
According to the agreement made in May, a sample of the music test will be videotaped in each grade and in each type of school in Boston and Needham, and possibly in South Hadley and West Hartford depending on the financial and technical situation. This is supposed to be done after musical testing with only the problem children. We also decided to videotape 10 to 15 minutes of the group work in the same classes at the beginning and at the end of the school term.
Research on Transfer Effects
I wrote down in my biography the most important fields of music education that I was concerned with. Years of experience with children of different ages led me to psychological research. Twenty years of teaching experience as well as the scientific proof of the Hungarian research convinced me that our music education has a many sided influence on children’s personalities. It is clear, however, that this influence, or we should say rather the change of a child’s personality, is not completely measurable yet. Any method of testing might be disputable over the point of validity or reliability.
In Hungary, we devised a series of tests of intelligence, creativity, cognitive processes, language, and sociability. The complete series contained partly standard tests and partly new ones, devised by a psychologist, a mathematician, a linguist, and an artist. The series of tests seem to be satisfactory in our Hungarian school system. However, I found a different situation in the U.S.
I accepted the offer of the position of being responsible for the research program of the Kodály Musical Training Institute in the hope that I could spend enough time studying the field of American psychological research, as well as the American educational system. Studying the educational system means to deal with four significant factors:
1) social, economic, and cultural background of the children;
2) school system;
3) the methods of teaching;
4) the teacher’s personality;
5) the children’s personalities.
I discovered only after spending a few months here that the first three factors have more significance here than in Hungary. In the first semester, I studied developmental psychology at Professor Kagan’s lectures at Harvard University. I had difficulties in understanding English. In the first two months I taped the lectures and listened to them over again several times before I was able to take notes. It was not much easier for me to read articles and psychological literature. In the second semester I was unable to attend lectures at Harvard regularly because I visited schools and I also took over Mrs. Robbins’ lessons at the Taft school. However, I became more familiar with American psychological and educational literature so I could choose appropriate material for study at home. I read English more fluently although I was still using a dictionary. After visiting 63 classes in 15 different schools I acquired certain knowledge of the American school system, although my knowledge was still incomplete.
Visiting schools and teaching offered me the possibility to discover the necessity of developing a new branch of our research. That is, to study the psychological basis of the Kodály method in the American adaptation. The method has to be altered according to the social, economical, and cultural background of the children. In every type of public school that we have taught, we have found it necessary to reform the children’s general attitude toward learning and social adjustment. But the need for a positive attitude is much more pressing in urban schools than in suburban schools. The Kodály method offers the possibility of serving the end of making children enthusiastic about learning while developing motivation for learning music and doing it together, as a group. We were able to study such motivation this year in teaching. The next task is to find suitable tests for measuring the different aspects of the children’s development.
The planned research for 1971-72 has to be divided into two main branches. One is to administer the musical test to every first grade Kodály group which starts in the 1971-72 school year, and to as many control groups as we can possibly afford to have involved in the program. At the same time, we must collect any information that the schools are able to give about the children including the data of reading readiness tests. The administration of tests to such a large number of children needs further financial and technical resources.
The second branch of the research is the analysis of the psychological basis of the Kodály method. It must be organized into a few groups at first, and it has to be made by American psychologists, preferably by a psychological laboratory independent from our Institute. This would make data acceptable for the American and International psychological forum. The analysis may serve two ends. The first is to base further research, that is, to find the best possible tests for measuring the transfer effects of the Kodály method. The second is to create flexible adaptations of the Kodály method without losing the main points of the basic Kodály concept. The new tendencies of American education make it necessary for Kodály teachers to be instructed about the psychological aspect of the Kodály method, thereby protecting it from being distorted or even destroyed by superficial adaptation. The psychological and educational concept may be taught as a theory parallel with the methodology. This study could be conducted partly by the psychologist of the Kodály Institute and partly by me while the teachers are training in Hungary.
We initially had hoped to make an arrangement with CEMREL for a research program for the Institute to build up for 1971-72 school year, but because of their excessive delay, we contacted two Harvard psychologists, Mr. Mike Novey and Dr. Barrie David Bortnick, who agreed to design the research program. This will be completed in about a month’s time.