The influence of teachers' conceptions on their students' learning: children's understanding of sheet music

Despite increasing interest in teachers' and students' conceptions of learning and teaching, and how they influence their practice, there are few studies testing the influence of teachers' conceptions on their students' learning.

This study tests how teaching conception (TC; with a distinction between direct and constructive) influences students' representations regarding sheet music.

Sixty students (8-12 years old) from music conservatories: 30 of them took lessons with teachers with a constructive TC and another 30 with teachers shown to have a direct TC.

Children were given a musical comprehension task in which they were asked to select and rank the contents they needed to learn. These contents had different levels of processing and complexity: symbolic, analytical, and referential. Three factorial ANOVAs, two-one-way ANOVAs, and four 2 × 3 repeated-measures ANOVAs were used to analyse the effects of and the interaction between the independent variables TC and class, both for/on total cards selected, their ranking, and each sub-category (the three processing levels).

ANOVAs on the selection and ranking of these contents showed that teachers' conceptions seem to mediate significantly in the way the students understand the music.

Students from constructive teachers have more complex and deep understanding of music. They select more elements for learning scores than those from traditional teachers. Teaching conception also influences the way in which children rank those elements. No difference exists between the way 8- and 12-year-olds learn scores. Children's understanding of the scores is more complex than assumed in other studies.