Music Theory Metacognition: How Thinking About Thinking Improves Music Learning

Academic researchers have discovered that students need a foundation of factual knowledge, an understanding of conceptual ideas, and organization skills to facilitate the retrieval of knowledge in order to best learn a topic. (Bransford, Donovan, & Pellegrino 1999, p. 21). When any of these three key aspects of learning are missing, students fail to learn a topic. In order to achieve these three goals for learning, professors can incorporate metacognitive activities in their classroom.The two goals of this thesis were: 1) to conduct a study that evaluates music students' self-awareness of metacognitive abilities while learning, and based on the results, 2) to propose specific activities that music theory instructors can use to leverage these metacognitive abilities in the classroom. I first offer a framework of definitions and research conducted on metacognition and metacognitive awareness. I then describe the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI), a survey that measures awareness of metacognition that was given to undergraduate and graduate music students at the University of Tennessee. I then discuss the survey results to determine how metacognition can be used in music theory classrooms.