Melissa J. Clayton and Professor Jerry L. Jaccard
The question that drives this research is: What is the process of musical thought development in children? In sorting through possible answers to this question I have studied the work of Piaget (1, 5 and 6) and Moog (4). Moog’s studies of the musical experience of pre-school age children has led him to conclude that the developmental changes in the structure of musical thought appear to coincide with changes from one developmental stage, as in the developmental stages set forth by Piaget, to the next and that the underlying principle of these changes have to do with memory (4).
Searching for a way to adequately examine musical memory, I discovered Piaget’s own study on memory (5). Piaget presented children of different ages with a configuration of sticks which they were told to remember. After one hour, one week, and one month they were asked what they remembered. The children remembered differently according to their age. The remarkable thing is that 74% of the children improved from one level of memory to the next between the one week and six months interviews. From this Piaget concludes that a memory-image is not merely a picture taken by the mind. A memory image “…acts in a symbolic manner so as to reflect the subject’s assimilation of ‘schemes’, that is, the way in which he understood the model (I say ‘understood’ , and not ‘copied’, which is an entirely different thing)…memory…is decoding of a code which has been changed, which is a better structure than it was before, and which gives rise to a new image which symbolizes the current state of the operational schema and not what it was at the time the encoding was done” (5). Memory in a “broad sense” is the “conservation” and use of structures (schema) with which we make sense of the world (5). As we develop, the schema change. They become more flexible and accurate. The conservation of schema is intelligence. It is the means by which we think. Therefore, to understand the development of musical thought, I needed to study the development of the structures of memory (schema) relating to music.
So this study became a musical parallel to the study done by Piaget. Instead of presenting the children with a stick configuration, I taught them a song line by line part to whole. An hour and a week later I asked them to sing the song back to me. The 6 month interview has not yet taken place. It is scheduled for September 2001.
My original plan of a sample size comparable to that in Piaget’s original study (61 children from ages 3 to 7 years all ages represented equally) ended up being a sample size of 31 children, 5 of which wouldn’t sing by themselves or at all. In addition to that, I did the study at the end of the school year, so I ended up only interviewing one complying three year old. The rest of the three year old class had already turned four.
Despite the limited sample size and the 6 month interview still pending, I have found some similarities in the way the children remembered according to their age. The song looks like this in sol feg notation: •
• • •|• • • •
s m s m ss l l ss m
The words are: Snail snail snail snail goes around and round and round.
The most common error for the three to five year olds was singing two snails instead of four. Almost all of the 6 and 7 year olds sang all four snails. The 3-5 year olds also had a tendency to improvise. They used the snail going round idea with other melodies, extra or less round and rounds, and one boy sang the snail to town. The other melodies used were either based on major mode melodies they knew or major mode patterns ending on do rather that the sol mi la set of notes in the original song.
The most common error for the 6 and 7 year old children was exchanging la la in the second phrase for the mi la more familiar to children’s playground singing repertory.
The 6 month interview will be where we can really examine the correlation between developmental stage and musical memory and find out if this musical memory study and the memory study of Piaget’s have significant similarities.
References
- Ginsburg, Herbert and Sylvia Opper. Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978.
- Ginsburg, Herbert. Entering the Child’s Mind: The Clinical interview in Psychological research and Practice. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Jaccard, Jerry L. A Conceptual Model for Literature-Based Musical Education. 1995.
- Moog, Helmut. The Musical Experience of the Pre-school Child. translated by Claudia Clarke. London: Schott & Co. Ltd., 1976.
- Piaget, Jean. On the Development of Memory and Identity. translated by Eleanor Duckworth. Barre, MA: The Barre Publishing Company,1968.
- Serafine, Mary. “Piagetian Research in Music.” Council for Research in Music Education, vol., 62 (1980): 1-21.