The role of formal music education on children's growth in informal music production

Recreational musicianship---making music during leisure-time---is an important program outcome for music education. However, this relationship has been hardly studied or employed as an evaluation outcome for music education programs. Instead, music education research often employs a truncated pool of indicators that primarily assess learning in other academic domains.;This thesis evaluates the critical and under-explored role of formal school music education in stimulating informal music participation (IMP). IMP is any act of music creation or performance that occurs in solitary, peer, or family-based contexts (free of any community institution oversight) during children's discretionary time. This thesis demonstrates that IMP is a relevant, observable and measurable goal of music education programs, and a worthy evaluation outcome for program assessments of school and community-based arts education offerings.;I examined this effect using three waves of data gathered from schools and children between fall 1999 and fall 2000. These data were from the Projects in Active Cultural Engagement evaluation of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation's School Arts Program (SAP). SAP is a ;Growth curve analyses demonstrate that involvement in music education predicts more IMP during recreational non-school hours. While IMP declines on average, over one year, children with higher amounts of music instruction continually initiated IMP more frequently. For instance, every doubling of total school-based instructional minutes in any semester resulted in an average .51 point higher IMP (full scale ranged from 22--152) among students involved only in school-based music instruction (p < .001; n = 641). This relationship exists for children of different grade levels, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity, but was attenuated by concurrent involvement in music instruction away from school. Variation in average growth trajectories due to differences in (a) family and peer support for music participation, and (b) type of instruction (e.g., school versus community-based instruction) are also examined.