Through her research, Rutkowski has learned that giving children opportunities to sing in small groups, or individually, consistently helps them learn to sing better than if they always sing in a large group (Rutkowski and Miller 2003a, 2003b; Rutkowski 1996). She currently is examining strategies that would allow children to do this—and to do it in ways that would not intimidate them—within the traditional large-group setting. Rutkowski also studies early childhood settings in which a less formal approach to teaching is most appropriate. She is analyzing data from a study she conducted with kindergarten children in which she is attempting to determine whether the children’s use of their singing voices improves after a year of informal musical guidance rather than the typical, formal musical guidance.
Music Education Children can learn to sing, even if they don’t appear to have a natural “musical ear.” That is what Professor of Music Education Joanne Rutkowski has found in her research on the nature of children’s singing voices and strategies for helping all children become successful singers. Rutkowski created the Singing Voice Development Measure, a rubric/measurement tool to assess children’s use of their singing voices (Rutkowski 2010). The measure—which has been used by many researchers and practitioners and is consistently highly reliable—is based on the notion that children first need to learn to use all registers of their voice before they will sing in tune. “Often children will sound like they can’t sing just because they don’t know how to use their voices; it’s not that they aren’t musical. Using the measure, I have found very low correlations between children’s use of their singing voices and their musical aptitudes,” said Rutkowski.
In addition to studying kindergartners, Rutkowski also teaches them. She recently brought along a male, undergraduate music-education major to her kindergarten music classes to observe how the children respond to his voice, which is an octave lower than Rutkowski’s voice. “The easiest vocal model for children is another child, or a female adult voice,” said Rutkowski. “Children seem to have difficulty singing well with an adult male voice, which is lower, as a model. My hypothesis is that once children become comfortable using their singing voices they will not have difficulty with an adult male model.”
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