Abstract
The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of 10 minutes of daily exposure for 10 weeks to a Chinese Music Curriculum and its effect on generating positive cultural attitudes towards the Chinese people, improving tonal discrimination skills, singing accuracy of tonal patterns, and accuracy of singing Chinese lyrics for third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students, compared to a comparison group not receiving the Chinese Music Curriculum. In an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida, 6 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes were chosen and randomly assigned to either an intervention or a comparison group. A Chinese Music Curriculum was developed for the intervention group and implemented by classroom teachers. Meanwhile, the comparison group received normal academic instruction and a weekly music class by a music specialist. Pre- and post-tests were administered to both the intervention and comparison groups: (1) Children's Attitudes toward Chinese (CATC), (2) Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation-Tonal (IMMA, Gordon, 1982), and (3) Tonal Pattern Performance Measure (TPPM). The Chinese Song Performance Measure (CSPM) was administered to the intervention group only in order to measure students' abilities for accurately singing the Chinese lyrics of a simple Chinese song, "Little Rat." Data were subjected to a mixed Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) statistical analysis, item analysis, and Pearson Product-Moment correlation. The results demonstrated that the CATC survey was a reliable and valid measure to assess children's attitudes toward Chinese people. The overall effect of the Chinese Music Curriculum was significant in combination of the three outcome measures: CATC, IMMA, and TPPM. The follow-up individual examination revealed that children's attitudes toward Chinese people and tonal pattern singing accuracy were significantly improved, but tonal discrimination skills did not improve. Grade was found to influence children's singing accuracy of tonal patterns with fifth graders outperforming the third and fourth graders. All participants in the intervention group were able to sing a Chinese song with over 70% accuracy of the Chinese lyrics.