An active e-book to foster self-regulation in music education

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this work is to analyze the concept of self-regulated learning and applying it to a web-based interface for music teaching. Design/methodology/approach – This work starts from a systematic review about music education and self-regulation during learning processes. Then, the paper identifies those meta-cognitive strategies that music students should adopt during their instrumental practice. The goal is applying such concepts to rethink the structure of a didactic e-book for instrumental music education. Thanks to the adoption of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1599 standard, the paper outlines a model of active e-book able to improve learners’ performances through proper cognitive and multi-modal scaffolds. In the last section, the design principles for an implementation will be proposed. Findings – This work applies theoretical research on self-regulated learning to the design and implementation of a working prototype. Research limitations/implications – A limitation is the lack of experimentation data, required to test the efficacy and effectiveness of the proposed e-book model and its impact on self-regulated music abilities. A validation strategy – e.g. based on scenarios – will be proposed in our future works, thanks to the support of music learning centres and focus groups composed by young Italian students. Originality/value – This work has been invited as an extension of the paper presented by the authors at EL2014 International Conference held in Lisbon. The previous work has been awarded as the best paper of the conference. In this extension, the authors provide further details about the proposed framework, highlighting in particular the implementation of scaffolds in the interface.