Las actividades musicales en educación infantilanálisis de los proyectos educativos

Abstract

Textbooks are didactic resources that even now in the 21st century still hegemonise curricular development in all stages of education, including Early Childhood Education. Music education at early ages can be conceived as a resource to stimulate other areas or to enjoy musical experiences themselves. However, textbooks might not always reflect coherent planning of musical content; they often present a great deal of difficulty for this stage and can even cause serious mistakes. The main objective of the thesis is to analyse from a musical and didactic point of view the musical proposals made by the publishers in their Educational Projects (textbooks) for Early Childhood Education. Each of the three articles that make up this thesis consists of a main objective that as a whole respond to the general objective set out in this research. The sample comprised 2,200 musical activities in textbooks from the leading publishing houses in Spain for the 2017/2018 school year. All school in the Region of Murcia (n = 497) were consulted to verify whether they used TBs, the ranking was established the first eight TBs in the ranking of most used were selected. For data collection an ad hoc instrument called the Protocol for the Systematic Analysis of Musical Activities in Early Childhood Education was developed. In order to verify the content validity of the instrument, the level of intra- and inter-evaluator agreement was checked (K = .92, K = .85 respectively). Likewise, expert judgment was achieved through a validation scale, whose results indicated a moderate concordance among judges (W = .65). The item covariation method was used to calculate instrument reliability and data reflected good internal consistency (α = .82). Finally, the instrument was applied to all activities from the chosen TBs and results were interpreted. It has been used both exploratory statistics for descriptive analysis and confirmatory statistics for a univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis of different variables. The results of this research showed large differences in the musical planning of publishing houses; the most current textbooks had more musical sessions and activities; activities which used music as an end in itself were more common than those used as a resource; the most developed content areas by publishers were movement/dance and listening; and finally, concerning resources and materials, half of the activities referred to the use of CD´s, but the incorporation of musical digital games was very low (4%). Regarding sound qualities, the results showed that the most worked on were timbre and duration, with intensity and pitch being the least worked on. Activities that worked on sound qualities most were those related to playing instruments, with the exception of duration, which was more present in movement/dance activities. Two thirds of musical activities in textbooks were related to qualities of sound, reflecting the importance publishers place on these in the teaching-learning proposals of music in Early Childhood Education textbooks. The results related to mistakes in the activities, revealed that 22.6% of analysed activities contained some type of mistake. The most frequent were in the musical category (concepts, terms or graphic representation), followed by didactic (level, planning or methodology) and, finally, those related to student worksheets.