Exploring the unmeasurable: valuing the long-term impacts of primary music education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study aims to explore the long-term impacts of primary music education in a progressive school in Tokyo where cooperative learning, democratic decision making, and mutual sharing of interests and purposes by students form the pedagogical basis. Establishing a causal relationship between music learning and its impact in later life is a challenging task, due to many confounding factors. Rather than looking for measurable effects, this study draws on students’ retrospective self-accounts. Although the latter may be viewed as less reliable, it possesses the benefit of allowing the students to assess what they consider to be the true value of their education. Positing that retrospective accounts can form the focus of a long-term impact study, this research targeted former sixth-grade students who became university students ten years later. While at primary school, they were actively involved in music making. A decade on, they were asked to reflect on their primary school music learning experiences. Based on their, and their teachers’, self-accounts, the research explored what they had learned in their music classes and how they valued their learning experiences.