You are cordially invited to present at the 2014 Research Poster Session!!!

Each year, KMEA sponsors a research poster session at the February In-Service Workshop. This year, the session will be on Friday, February 28th from 3:00 - 3:55 PM, in Room 205 of Century II. The session includes poster presentations of music education research by public school educators, university faculty, and university students. Each presenter has an exhibition area where they display materials pertaining to their research. If you are interested in presenting original research at this session, please contact me, Chris Johnson, KMEA Research Chair, by February 15th. You may email me at the address shown at the top of this page.

The poster session is an excellent opportunity for workshop attendees to discover many things. This session allows you to learn what are the current burning questions in music education, and what we know about these topics. Opportunities to speak with the researchers can tell you not only about the project in hand, but also about what Music Education knows about many diverse topics. This session is one where people can drop in and stay for a few minutes to talk with one person who may well have interesting information, or stay for the entire hour and glean informed views from many participants regarding all manner of topics. We usually see about 200 people come through this event. This year, we hope even more people will come by to take advantage of this dynamic learning opportunity.

2014 General Research Session
The general research session will include two presentations of recent research in music education and the psychology of music. As in all years, the research arm of KMEA seeks to identify and include research from the very best the state has to offer. This year's presenters features two engaging presentations that I am sure will inform and engage.

The first presentation features Teddi Ricketts, Nancy McKellar, Randall Ellsworth, and Elaine Bernstorf discussing Relationships Between Instrumental Music Participation and Academic Achievement in Low Socioeconomic Students. The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between student participation in instrumental music class and academic achievement, specifically in low SES students. The hypothesis was that fifth and sixth grade students who participated in an instrumental music program would display increased levels of achievement, with this relationship more pronounced among students who receive free and reduced lunches. Results show a statistically significant relationship between sixth grade instrumental music participation and reading scores, as well as math scores. These results suggest that duration (i.e., months of instruction) in instrumental music class may be important to increases in academic achievement.

The second presentation in this session will feature Melissa Grady who will discussing a project entitled: Effects of nonverbal gestures exhibited by multiple conductors on acoustical, visual, and psychoacoustical measures of choral music-making: A collective case study. This collective case study examined potential acoustical and psychoacoustical effects of conductor arm and hand gestural stimuli on the choral music-making of an established women's choir (N = 18), as it performed a previously learned composition under multiple conductors (the ensemble's regular conductor, whose nonverbal leadership constituted the baseline condition, and 5 guest conductors, whose nonverbal leadership constituted the experimental conditions).

The general session this year will be on Friday, February 28th from 12:55-1:45 p.m. in Room 205 of Century II. As always, we will have abstracts for the general session available at the door to the session. We hope you will come by, look at the talks to be presented, and come on in to see how the newest knowledge in our profession can make your classroom a more effective experience for your students.