| A great demand has been placed on instructional leaders to incorporate more technology into their schools, and the iPad has become very popular for this task despite the small amount of empirical data demonstrating effectiveness. A quantitative, quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design was used to examine the effects of iPad-based instruction in comparison with traditional music instruction on the vocal pitch matching accuracy of 381 third- and fourth-grade students at a Title 1, K-5 public school in central Alabama. This study was based on Mishra and Koehler's technological pedagogical content knowledge theory. Participants were audio-recorded singing a sequence of pitches as a pretest and then placed in two experimental groups and a control group for 4 weeks. The experimental groups received iPad-based pitch matching instruction, and traditional pitch matching instruction; the control did not receive any pitch matching instruction. The students took a posttest in the same manner as the pretest. The analysis of variance and the Tukey post-hoc revealed significant differences, F(2,366) = 7.643, p < .001, between the contact control group (M = -0.003, SD = 1.245) and the iPad group (M = 0.478, SD = 1.130) and the contact control and the traditional group ( M = 0.555, SD = 1.290) and the contact control group. No significant differences were found between the iPad group and the traditional group. These findings suggest that iPad-based instruction can lead to positive academic results. However, the iPad instruction in music in this 4-week quasi-experiment did not affect better pitch matching accuracy than traditional instruction. |
