Faculty Fellow Ann Clements to study effect of technology on children’s musical play

Ann Clements, associate professor of music education, plans to study the effect of video game technology and media influences on children’s musical play as a summer 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) Faculty Fellow. The musical play she is interested in is the informal kind that takes place on the playground and at home, including songs that children learn from each other.

As an associate professor in the School of Music, Clements trains K-12 music teachers. As a researcher in ethnomusicology (the anthropology of music), she is interested in why people “do” music (make music, listen to music, play with music), not just in the “concert hall” sense, but as it exists in everyday life, and why so many people are so engaged with musical games.

Clements, who gives guitar instruction, said that guitar sales actually increased by 23 percent after the release of the first “Guitar Hero” game. She is interested in how to help music teachers assist K-12 students who have become good at playing a game like “Guitar Hero” to undergo the necessary transition to be good at playing a real guitar.

Working with a team from TLT including Brett Bixler, Elizabeth Pyatt, Jason Wolfe, and Hannah Inzko, she has two goals for her summer 2010 fellowship.

One goal is to work with TLT’s Educational Gaming Commons (EGC) to build a searchable repository of research on gaming, including not only written research but also video and audio recordings captured during research. She noted that such a central place to go to for gaming research is largely lacking not just for Penn State researchers but for researchers in the educational gaming field in general.

The other goal is to conduct a research project to observe children taking part in musical play. Previous studies have shown that children’s exposure to technology and media has changed song tunes and words in their musical play. Clements would like to study whether technology is now also changing the form of musical play itself.

She plans to recruit ten children of varying ages from the local community and their parents. Initially, she will interview the parents on how they have observed their children playing musically.

Then she, along with two Penn State students assisting in the research, will visit the children’s homes twice. During each visit, they will take along an assortment of musical video games, as well as traditional musical instruments and playground equipment such as jump ropes. They will then simply ask the children to play, then observe their play and what activities they gravitate towards.

Following the home visits, Clements and her team will then invite all ten children as a group to the EGC Lab in 6A Findlay Commons, University Park, where again, they will be free to play with an assortment of musical video games as well as traditional instruments and toys. The children will be interviewed as a group during the visits, and all their play as well as the interviews will be recorded.

After all the sessions with the children, Clements will do a post-interview with their parents to find out their observations on whether or not their children’s musical play had changed over the course of the study.

Clements will use the data collected, which will be largely qualitative in nature, to write a paper for submission to a journal, as well as to populate the gaming research repository that will be created.

Over the course of summer 2010, members of Clements’s Faculty Fellow team will post updates and reflections about the research at the TLT Faculty Fellows blog site at http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/fellows/.

In her first post on the site, Clements said she values the social interaction of working with a team and moving out of the comfortable surroundings of the discipline she knows so well, music, to working with others in a different area of expertise, technology. She wrote, “The potential rewards of working in a team as part of the TLT Fellowship program bring to mind the concept of Groove...Groove is an elusive concept, but in essence, it is the feeling, phrasing, and inflection that are communally created among musicians who are in the peak of their united playing.”

To learn more about the TLT Faculty Fellows program, visit http://tlt.its.psu.edu/faculty/fellowship.