A Reflective Lens: Music Pedagogical Research to Transform Practice | Page 19

A Reflective Lens:
Music Pedagogical Research to Transform Practice

analyse the process of completing the task (rather than just
focusing on the end product which was the composition
piece performed), I felt that the minute details of students’
reactions to a particular situation were very useful.
Student Interviews
I conducted four interview sessions; each done after every
lesson, with the exception of Lesson Five. The duration
for each interview was between 20 and 25 minutes, with
interviews being conducted at 7a.m. before the school’s
daily flag rising ceremony at 7.25a.m. Due to timetable
constraints, the interviews were conducted two days
after each lesson and there was a need to recap what
students had done in the lesson, as some of them could
not remember the exact details of their conversations and
discussions.
The main purpose of the interviews was to discuss the
lesson they had undergone. Students explained their
musical decisions and their group decisions in other areas;
such as their strategy or approach in completing the task,
the members’ roles, and the choice of instruments. They
also talked about the dynamics of the group.
The research assistant then transcribed the interviews so
that the data could be processed. However, since the
interview was recorded on an audio recorder (without
video), the research assistant had some difficulty at times
in identifying the conversation source, since there were at
least five students at one interview. Although she used voice
recognition software to extract samples of the students’
audio voice from the video recordings and matched them
with the audio recordings from the interview sessions,
accuracy might have been compromised.

16