Throughout my first weeks of research, I found a couple of interesting articles. In this blog post, I will present one of these.
Spring 2023, the student So Young Jun wrote a master’s thesis on Northwestern College in Iowa. Key words connected to her article: autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, color, symbol, orchestra and music.
She followed a wind orchestra of 20 people with developmental disabilities for five weeks. Orchestral performance requires dozens of individuals to listen to each other and communicate with eye contact and body language. It is important to pay attention to the conductor and always be alert, which can be hard for children and people with developmental disabilities. Jun wanted to explore different methods to make it easier for the orchestra members to create a single piece of music together. The research questions were:
- For students with special needs, specifically autism spectrum, were there any differences observed when using the visual support and when not using the support?
- Has visual support for members with special needs, specifically those with autism helped improve orchestra performance?
Together with the conductor, Jun implemented a set of different symbols in their music sheets to see if it could improve the orchestra performance. The conductor used some time to teach them to the members in the very beginning of the project. The members also practiced at home together with their parents throughout the five weeks.
One of the symbols were red glasses (picture above). They mark when the members should look specifically at the conductor. For the action research, the conductor stopped conducting at the point where the glasses mark appeared, and it was checked and recorded whether the members continued playing the instrument or stopped playing the instrument after seeing the hand signal.
Results
Quoted directly from the article (p. 27-28):
The process of having many teachers explaining and understanding a single instruction to the members with different words and phrases consumed a lot of time. However, by providing consistent education with symbols, all instructors have shortened the training time for the content and made it possible to conduct efficient rehearsals.
The implementation was time consuming, but the results were positive. Most of the orchestra members were more alert and got better at paying attention to the conductor during the research period.
I find these results very interesting, and will use it both as an inspiration and motivation for my further work.
Reference
Jun, S. Y. (2023). Autism Spectrum: The Impact of Colors and Symbols Have on Students Outcome. Northwestern College, Orange City Florida, USA. Retrieved from https://nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1477&context=education_masters
