Exploring the Music Reading Skills of 10-to 14-Year-Old Students in an Online Test Environment

Improving music literacy is a central part of music education in Hungary. Technology-based assessment is a developing area that can be extended to musical skills, offering new possibilities for diagnostic testing. The study by Asztalos and Csapó (2015) was the first attempt to develop an online. test to investigate music perception skills. The aim of our study was to analyse students' music reading skills based on Zoltán Kodály's philosophy of music education, and to develop a technology-based instrument to assess music reading skills. Music reading is usually regarded as a collection of sub-skills that include perception (decoding note patterns), use of memory (recognising patterns), kinesthetics, and use of music-related problem-solving skills (improvisation) (Lehmann & McArthur, 2002). Knowledge of musical syntax, musical styles, the ability to inner-hear, the practice of sight-singing (Wollner & Halfpenny, 2003) and the characteristics of musical text also have an influence on music reading. In our research we tested the music reading skills of students who are specialized in music (N=267) and those of mainstream school students (N=758). Two versions of the test were developed on the eDia platform with a reliability of Cronbach's alpha=0.832 in music schools and Cronbach's alpha=0.839 in primary schools. The performance of the music students was 76.69% (SD=12.35). A significant difference was found in the achievements between grades six and eight (F=4.206, p=0.007). Therefore, students' music reading skills show an improvement between these grades. The mean performance of the primary school students in the test was 54.84% (SD=18.65), with no significant differences between the four grades. Visual/spatial tasks were not part of the music test, but we were interested in whether students' spatial skills correlated with their musical skills. As expected, significant correlations were found between the achievements on the music reading test and the spatial skills test (p < 0.001).