Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of aural and visual performance modeling by a string teacher on junior/middle and senior high school students' executive skills and musical performance skills. Aural and visual modeling included teacher in-class performances and demonstrations.The executive skills for the string player included the techniques which involve physical manipulation of the instrument such as left hand, finger, and arm placement, bow grip, right arm placement, and posture. The performance skills included rhythmic accuracy, note accuracy, intonation accuracy, bow markings, dynamic markings, and articulation markings.This study used a pretest-posttest, two-group design. Thirty junior and senior high school students enrolled in a heterogeneous string program were the subjects for the study. Students at each level were matched in pairs according to experience, and members in each pair were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The instructional setting, treatment time, and conditions were the same for both the experimental and control groups with the exception of the treatment variable: performance modeling by the instructor. Following the pretest were ten forty-minute sessions of instruction by the same instructor on an every other day schedule.Students' performances on investigator-constructed measures of string executive and performance skills were videotaped prior to and following treatment. Pretest and posttest performances were randomly intermixed. Three professional string players with teaching backgrounds at the university level, rated each performance on the respective skills. The String Executive and Performance Evaluation Instrument was patterned after Dressman's Instrumental Performance Competency Test.Results revealed no statistically significant differences between the control and experimental groups' executive and performance skill achievement scores.