Students’ perception of the relationship between prior knowledge and musical competencies a case study at university of education, winneba department of music education

Abstract

This project involved discovering the musical backgrounds of beginning music students of UEW. The goal was to show how their prior learning affects their musical abilities and their individual interests. All level 100 students‘ background was investigated using a questionnaire. Data was analyzed using quantitative statistics and presented in tabular form containing the number of responses per item (frequency) and the percentage of each response via graphs. The findings indicated that respondents had prior knowledge in all forms of African music: art-composed, indigenous and popular music. After showing that music student‘s posses prior knowledge in all forms of African music, this research accentuates the connection(s) between prior knowledge and music abilities from students‘ perspectives. This was accomplished through a stratum that organizes musical competencies into instrumental and non-instrumental musical competencies. It was confirmed that prior knowledge appears to influence music students‘ musical competencies in more positive ways than otherwise in playing of musical instruments, composition, sound set-up, choir management, and dancing and music business. Engaging student‘s pre-existing knowledge or misperceptions offers music educators an efficient way to formally diagnose their students‘ baseline, which should then serve as the critical first step in the teaching/learning cycle of tertiary music classrooms in Africa.