Music and education – Music in education -symposium was organized and chaired by Research director . It included six talks introducing pioneering projects from the Faculty of Educational Sciences in which music is used as one ingredient to foster learning. These projects dealt with various age groups, ways and aims of learning, and several ways of how music is used.
Postdoctoral researcher started the session by reporting on the current state of research on music interventions to support language and brain development in dyslexia. He described the benefits of music for ameliorating dyslexia and presented results from the DyslexiaBaby Study (Lukivauva), which showed that passive music listening can enhance neural speech-sound discrimination abilities in infancy. He also introduced the ongoing BusyBaby (Vauhtivauva) study, which aims to test the effects of active music-making during infancy.
introduced the ). One part of it is MUSAMOKSU (Music for Supporting Multilingualism and Finnish Language Learning) which designs activities and materials to support multilingualism by means of music. These are currently being developed and tested in early childhood education settings and were also demonstrated in the session.
Doctoral researcher reported the progress of her intervention study exploring the pedagogical use of music in teaching Chinese language to Finnish-speaking adults. The EEG-based multi-feature MMN paradigm and the innovative music-enriched learning activities were also introduced.
Doctoral researcher presented his current doctoral research on flow and drum learning. He examines how the subjective experience of engagement relates to skill acquisition and performance expectations throughout the learning process. He also introduced future lines of research addressing the methodological challenges for measuring complex phenomena such as flow and music skills.
Professor showed some alarming results on the attitudes and competencies of the teacher students in using music in their teaching. Her questionnaire study shows that many teacher students feel that they lack the competence to teach music and to use musical teaching methods, which would be especially important in teaching languages and in helping learners focus. She presented a plan for launching a MOOC course that would help teacher students and in-service teachers to practice these methods.
Doctoral researcher presented examples of integrating music into other subjects and to everyday practices in instructional settings. Examples were based on the material gathered mainly from Finnish theses. This material can be found at the website . This project Anni completed before starting as a doctoral researcher with the aim to investigate the willingness of university students to communicate in Swedish.
All these projects (and many more) are conducted in the research group which is part of the national in 2022-2029. This centre is coordinated by the music researchers at the University of Jyväskylä. From the University of Helsinki, it consists of research groups in the Faculty of Medicine (Prof. Teppo Särkämö and Prof. Teija Kujala) investigating music functions as part of child development and in aging.