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Improving Sightreading Accuracy: A Meta-Analysis.
Abstract
The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine whether experimentally tested sightreading interventions positively influenced sightreading ability. A meta-analysis was conducted with 92 quasi-experimental research studies on sightreading (124 individual analyses) to determine the overall effect size of treatment and to examine how the effect size was influenced by treatment type, sightreading mode (sightreading/sightsinging), age and experience of sight reader, type of sightreading test, and other study design elements. The analysis revealed a small overall effect size for treatment (d = −0.18, 95% CI [−0.24, −0.11]). Of the moderator variables, only treatment-type was significant, with treatments categorized as “Aural Training,” “Controlled Reading,” “Creative Activities,” and “Singing/Solfege” significantly and positively affecting sightreading. There was a moderately strong within-group effect size (d = −0.48, 95% CI [−0.56, −0.40]), indicating that sightreading generally improved pre- to posttest for both control and treatment groups.
... Komponering der notasjon av klingende musikk er en del av den skapende prosessen, har sjelden blitt vurdert som lesefremmede tiltak i øving på primavistaspill (Leikvoll, 2017), i motsetning til blant annet gehørtrening, synging, rytmetrening og intervalltrening, som synes å ha blitt hyppig brukt i forskningsdesign som omhandler notelesing (Kopiez & Lee, 2008;Mishra, 2014). Denne nedprioriteringen kan føre til at elevene ikke klarer å etablere den kunnskapen om grunnleggende strukturer og vokabular som er nødvendig for å laere å lese musikk (Hogenes et al., 2014;Kopiez & Lee, 2008). ...
... Denne nedprioriteringen kan føre til at elevene ikke klarer å etablere den kunnskapen om grunnleggende strukturer og vokabular som er nødvendig for å laere å lese musikk (Hogenes et al., 2014;Kopiez & Lee, 2008). Mishra (2014) har gjort en metaanalyse av tilgjengelige undersøkelser der hun beskriver ulike former for intervensjon for å øke ferdigheter i primavistaspill hos en gruppe deltakere. Meta-analysen tok for seg 124 studier, der kun 5,4 prosent av tiltakene ble kategorisert som knyttet til notasjon. ...
Artikkelen beskriver utvalgte faktorer knyttet til bruk av komponering og improvisasjon i instrumentalundervisning på kulturskolene i Norge i lys av utvikling av grunnleggende musikalsk forståelse. Spørsmålene det søkes svar på er: I hvor stor grad brukes skapende aktiviteter av instrumentallærere? Hva synes lærerne om bruk av disse aktivitetene i kulturskoleundervisningen? Hva påvirker valgene de tar? Datamaterialet består av besvarelser fra en nettbasert spørreundersøkelse sendt til instrumentallærere ved samtlige kulturskoler i Vestland fylke. Undersøkelsen ble besvart av 65 respondenter. Det viser seg at mens majoriteten av respondentene mener at bruk av skapende aktiviteter bør være en viktig del av instrumentalundervisningen på alle nivåer, bruker svært få av dem disse aktivitetene i sin egen undervisning. Artikkelen drøfter mulige årsaker til dette forholdet, med utgangspunkt i respondentenes kommentarer og relevante forskningsresultater om skapende musikkundervisning. Det argumenteres for at bruk av skapende aktiviteter i undervisningen kan ha positiv effekt på utvikling av notelesingsferdigheter, teknikk og musikalsk forståelse hos instrumentalelever på kulturskolen. Abstract in English:Using composition and improvisation in instrumental teaching: Time-thief or a gateway to musical understanding?This article describes the use of composition and improvisation in instrumental teaching at extra-curricular Schools of Music and Performing Arts in Norway, in light of the development of basic musical understanding. The research questions are: How often do instrumental teachers use creative activities? What do they think about using them in their teaching? What influences their choices? The data consists of responses from an online survey sent to instrumental teachers at all extra-curricular schools of music and performing arts in Vestland county. The survey was answered by 65 respondents. The findings show that, although the majority of respondents believe that the use of improvisation and composition should be an important part of instrumental teaching at all levels, very few of them use these activities in practice. The article discusses possible reasons for this conclusion, based on the respondents’ comments in the survey, as well as relevant research results. It is argued that the use of creative activities in instrumental teaching can have a positive effect on the development of music reading skills and technique among instrumental pupils.
... Un aspecto que ha generado debate es si la práctica deliberada, es decir, el simple hecho de leer a primera vista, mejora el desempeño. Mishra (2014) se pronuncia en contra de esta idea, aunque encontró que en investigaciones que buscan desarrollar la LPV, tanto los participantes de los grupos experimentales, como aquellos de los grupos control que reportan leer de manera independiente, aumentaron su nivel de desempeño. La investigadora atribuye la mejora en ambos grupos a la falta de rigurosidad de los estudios, y no a la práctica por sí misma. ...
... Debido a que se deseaba conocer los efectos de la instrucción regular de LPV, no se dieron instrucciones a los docentes para fomentar las creencias de autoeficacia en los estudiantes. Asimismo, no se controló el tiempo y contenido de las actividades de LPV, no participaron estudiantes de instrumentos de cuerdas, percusiones o canto, ni se contó con un grupo control que permitiera determinar los efectos del desarrollo instrumental general (Lehmann y Kopiez, 2016;Mishra, 2014). El número de voluntarios fue reducido, ya que la intervención requería que los docentes dedicaran tiempo de clase a una habilidad comúnmente no abordada en la materia de instrumento individual. ...
... Results are somewhat inconsistent, with improvements often small and nonsignificant, depending on the learning approach (for a meta-analysis, see Mishra, 2014). Training normally takes place over several weeks at minimum to an entire academic year and again tends to focus on some type of blocked repetition. ...
... Future research is, of course, still needed to explore whether a similar approach can be effective in learning other information on the musical staff, such as timing information (e.g., how long to play a note; see Boyle, 1970;Pike & Carter, 2010). In addition, aural learning, that is, learning to associate the sounds with note positions, has previously been identified as a useful strategy in learning to sight read (see Mishra, 2014, for a meta-analysis). In currently ongoing research we are exploring how auditory stimuli influence sight reading in addition to how procedures akin to the current one can aid in developing the ability to detect pitches by ear (Iorio et al., 2022), termed absolute (or perfect) pitch (Bachem, 1955;Deutsch, 2013). ...
Learning to read and play music written in standard notation, termed sight reading, is an important yet difficult aspect of early music education. However, the music contingency learning procedure produces rapid and robust early learning of the motor execution associated with note positions. In this task, nonmusicians identify a note name (e.g., "do") written inside a note in one of the vertical positions of the musical staff with a keyboard response. Each note position is presented frequently with the matching (congruent) note name and rarely with the incongruent note names. The present work further explores this novel learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the proportion of congruent trials from 50 to 100%. The contingency effect, along with contingency awareness (i.e., verbalizable knowledge of note meanings), increased with a stronger contingency manipulation. In Experiment 2, half of the participants responded to the note positions (instead of the note names) with a keyboard response. A learning effect was also observed for this task, though contingency awareness was reduced in this group. These results shed more light on the properties of incidental music learning and further suggest more ideal parameters for future practical applications to supplement traditional instruction in real-world music education.
... To our knowledge, no meta-analysis has been published on the effect of musical expertise on music reading through eye movements. In 2014, Mishra focused on the sight-reading literature and published two metaanalyses (Mishra, 2014a(Mishra, , 2014b. One of these investigated the relationship between various stable cognitive characteristics (e.g., IQ and personality) and sight-reading abilities (i.e., correlation between sight-reading performance and other continuous measures). ...
... Her results showed that factors that can be improved with practice, such as music-reading activities, correlated more strongly with sight-reading abilities than did stable cognitive characteristics. The other meta-analysis (Mishra, 2014b) investigated the benefits of various interventions in enhancing sight-reading abilities and found that training eye movements through controlled music reading can improve sight reading. ...
The current meta-analysis was conducted on 12 studies comparing the eye movements of expert versus non-expert musicians and attempted to determine which eye movement measures are expertise dependent during music reading. The total dataset of 61 comparisons was divided into four subsets, each concerning one eye-movement variable (i.e., fixation duration, number of fixations, saccade amplitude, and gaze duration). We used a variance estimation method to aggregate the effect sizes. The results support the robust finding of reduced fixation duration in expert musicians (Subset 1, g = -0.72). Due to low statistical power because of limited effect sizes, the results on the number of fixations, saccade amplitude, and gaze duration were not reliable. We conducted meta-regression analyses to determine potential moderators of the effect of expertise on eye movements (i.e., definition of experimental groups, type of musical task performed, type of musical material used or tempo control). Moderator analyses did not yield any reliable results. The need for consistency in the experimental methodology is discussed.
*The first two authors equally contributed to the first authorship
... For this purpose, we used a 21 modified version of the musical contingency learning procedure from our previous studies 22 Schmidt et al., 2023), as discussed in the Introduction. Because previous 1 research suggested that a combined presentation of both note positions and tones can benefit 2 the acquisition of musical skills such as sight-reading (Mishra, 2014), one might posit that 3 learning to identify pitches by ear would also be improved by presenting musical notation as a 4 supplementary visual cue. We therefore compared two groups that were exposed to different 5 cue-target associations. ...
Incidental learning occurs rather rapidly and effortlessly in a range of different domains, such as early language acquisition, motor learning, and a wide range of more arbitrary laboratory tasks. The present report explores the efficacy of an incidental learning task in the acquisition of pitch-label associations, that is, the ability to identify and name musical notes by ear. In experiment 1, 2 and 3 participants were asked to respond to the target (a note name) while ignoring the cues (either a tone or, in one experiment, a tone with a note position). In a pretest and posttest, we further analyzed their ability to guess the name of the tone in a tone naming task. We also explored the role of intentionality in acquiring and remembering pitch-label associations, but there were only small suggestive trends for slightly better performance for a group instructed to try to learn the contingencies compared to a purely incidental learning group (i.e., with no instructions about the contingencies), suggesting that learning is at least primarily incidental. Our research opens up new venues for the investigations of incidental learning related to the acquisition of musical features useful to performance (how to play).
... Emphatically, however, such recognition should not be seen as a cognitive trick that is separate from playing music. While most studies on sight-reading achievement operate on error rates (see Mishra, 2014), this may have the unfortunate tendency of reducing sight-reading skill to pressing the right keys at an approximately right time. Even supposing that the main challenge of reading music is just "to form adequate motor responses to perceived notation" (Fourie, 2004, p. 1), in the real world such achievements are also likely to involve the activation of stylistically appropriate action schemata for phrasing, micro-timing, and dynamics. ...
This study concerns classical musicians' ability to recognize style periods from very brief visual exposure to musical notation. 25 professional pianists were shown nine 500-ms displays of musical excerpts from piano works by J. S. Bach, L. v. Beethoven, and F. Chopin. The pianists were told to describe what they saw and to assess the style period of the music. Recognition was relatively good: 49% of the verbal protocols included a correct style period label or the right composer name. Verbal protocols also supported the notion that style recognition chiefly relies on intuitive, holistic integration of information, rather than on reflective, analytic processing. First, correct responses regarding style period occurred significantly earlier than incorrect ones, which suggests that they may have taken place more intuitively. Second, correct recognitions were not preceded by richer spoken contents than was found in the case of non-recognition. Indeed, the opposite was the case for composer recognition, which again associates recognition with intuitive processing. It is argued that the rapid recognition of musical style characteristics is a prerequisite for stylistically sensitive sight reading.
... 297) olarak açıklamışlardır. Yine geliştirilmesi beklenen müzikal becerilerden olan deşifre okuma becerilerinin geliştirilmesinde solfej en faydalı çalışmalardan birisi olarak görülmektedir (Mishra, 2014). İyi bir müzisyen olmanın ilk şartı olarak görülen solfejin, kişide refleks haline gelmesi hedeflenen seviyedir (Kalkan, 2021). ...
... 297) olarak açıklamışlardır. Yine geliştirilmesi beklenen müzikal becerilerden olan deşifre okuma becerilerinin geliştirilmesinde solfej en faydalı çalışmalardan birisi olarak görülmektedir (Mishra, 2014). İyi bir müzisyen olmanın ilk şartı olarak görülen solfejin, kişide refleks haline gelmesi hedeflenen seviyedir (Kalkan, 2021). ...
... Aural skills are also fundamental for in-service music teachers who consider these classes a valuable part of their training: for example, ensemble directors rely on their aural skills on a daily basis (Groulx, 2016). In addition, a meta-analysis conducted by Mishra (2014) suggests that aural skills interventions improve instrumental sight-reading ability, which is crucial for many professional musicians (Lehmann & McArthur, 2002). Therefore, improving this ability seems relevant to musicians' everyday life. ...
Sight-singing is an inescapable component of music training in higher education and is often challenging for students. However, some strategies could help students perform. Yet, the extent to which students can use strategies to improve their sight-singing performance remains unclear. This article asks two questions to fill this gap: (1) Which strategies do students use when sight-singing? (2) Does the application of some types of strategy predict performance? We recruited 56 postsecondary music students and asked them about their musical backgrounds. They then sight-sang a short melody while we recorded their eye movements. After that, we conducted semi-structured retrospective interviews, using eye-movement videos and attention distribution heatmaps to help participants remember the strategies they used. We analyzed the interview transcripts to identify the strategies students used and regrouped them into categories. We extracted seven categories and discovered that using body movements predicted rhythm scores, that using musical knowledge predicted pitch and combined scores, and that relying on automatic skills predicted all dimensions of sight-singing performance. We recommend that aural skills instructors teach strategies explicitly and help students develop robust musical knowledge, as they are required to build strong automatic skills.
Sight-reading poses persistent challenges for professional musicians, particularly those lacking adept sight-reading skills. Recognizing the practical implications of sight-reading as a facilitator of musical learning, scholarly endeavors have sought to identify the components that influence sight-reading proficiency. The focus on diverse tonal environments has surfaced as a key avenue for unveiling the complexities of tonality-related sight-reading skills. Against this backdrop, the present study delved into the intricate relationship between sight-reading components and tonal characteristics in music, employing performers’ self-assessments of their proficiencies in these domains. The findings revealed that sight-readers exhibit comparable self-assessments of their proficiency in sight-reading, but a significant disparity emerged between tonal and atonal sight-reading. Common predictors—rhythm reading, playing by ear, and performance techniques—emerged as influential factors explaining proficiency in both tonal and atonal sight-reading proficiency. In contrast, the predictors that include knowledge of tonal center, tonal function, and basic music theory were indicative for tonal sight-reading, while music interpretation and complexity of tonality were connected to atonal sight-reading proficiency. The findings highlight the useful integration of sight-reading components within diverse tonal environments, which offers flexibility, practicality, and adaptability in sight-readers’ practice.
Studies of music reading are reviewed with respect to two principal questions: (1) What differences are there between the reading processes of good and poor readers? and (2) To what extent is musical knowledge implicated in reading for performance? The evidence reviewed shows (1) a typical "skill effect" such that better readers have better visual memories for notation and show more sensitivity to structural configurations in the stimuli and (2) that much of what is read is analyzed for musical significance prior to the formulation of motor commands for response. Music reading is in this respect, despite its atypical input modality, a true species of music perception.
Theories arguing that specific skills are acquired through extended practice cannot easily account for some musicians’ ability to perform unfamiliar music without preparation at first sight (sight-reading). This study identified the source of individual differences in this ability among expert pianists by relating component abilities of sight-reading and biographical indicators of skill acquisition to actual sight-reading performance. Sixteen advanced pianists of comparable skill played music without rehearsal (sight-reading) and after brief rehearsal (accompanying). Performances were paced by a recorded melody line. Pianists then performed experimental tasks designed to capture isolated subskills of sight-reading such as improvisation, recall, and kinesthetic ability. Sight-reading and accompanying performance correlated significantly with performance on the component tasks and with interview data on subjects’ training background, including the accumulated amount of time spent with accompanying-related activities and the size of accompanying repertoire. After controlling for the effects of subskills, age, professional specialization, and an indicator of general pianistic skill, accumulated accompanying experience and size of accompanying repertoire still accounted for significant unique variance in sight-reading and accompanying performance. Individual differences in unrehearsed performance among expert pianists reflect the consequences of domain-relevant activities (accompanying) and deliberate skill-building efforts (increase in size of relevant repertoire).
IntroductionIndividual studiesThe summary effectHeterogeneity of effect sizesSummary points
This meta-analysis of 30 studies using a variety of music interventions to affect reading skills resulted in a moderately strong, significant, overall effect size of d = .32. When music activities incorporate specific reading skills matched to the needs of identified children (d = .44) or contingent music is used to reinforce reading behavior (d = .66), benefits are large. The music activities that pair alphabet recognition with phonetic patterns, incorporate word segmentation and sound blending skills, and promote rapid decoding skills are effective in enhancing reading instruction and require little transfer to the assessment methodology. Benefits are greater when the special music reading activities are added to an existing music education curriculum than when replacing it. All schedules of intervention are equally effective regardless of whether daily, intense, short-term, or weekly periodic intervention spread across the school year.
This meta-analysis evaluated 208 variables derived from 98 studies incorporating I music as a contingency for education and therapeutic objectives. Variables were converted to effect sizes (ES) via statistical formulae and compared for determination of characteristics affecting reinforcement value of music. The overall benefits attributable to contingent music were almost three standard deviations greater than control/baseline conditions (ES= 2.90). Results demonstrate that contingent music was more effective than contingent nonmusic stimuli used in these studies and more effective than continuous music. Pairing other stimuli such as food, approval, or visual stimulation with the music decreased its effectiveness as a reinforcer. Uniquely, music functioned as a reinforcer and simultaneously as subject matter, and there was evidence of generalized benefit to other academic and social behaviors that were measured but were not contingently reinforced with music.