Description and evaluation of orchestra and conduction course teaching process in music education branches of the faculties of education

The aim of this research is to contribute to the course ?Orchestra and Conduction? in the Music Education Branches of Education Faculties, to be more functioning and to have more functional structure by stating and evaluating the current situation and proposing some measures. The method of the research is descriptive research with quantitative and qualitative dimensions that are based on an eclectic approach. The universe of the research is the students and lecturers of ?Orchestra and Conduction? courses in Music Education Branches of Fine Arts Education Departments in Education Faculties of the universities in Turkey. The data which is needed for the analysis of the problem that is subject to the research have been obtained through literature survey, questionnaires, and constructed interviews in order to state the education process of the course ?Orchestra and Conduction? in terms of planning, practicing, and evaluating situations. vi The sample of the research is composed of the lecturers who taught ?Orchestra and Conduction? courses in 2006-2007 academic year and who taught these courses in the previous years, and last year students who attended this courses in Music Education Branches of Education Faculties. Questionnaire and interview forms have been applied by different constructions for lecturers and students. Various statistical analysis techniques within the SPSS 12.0 software package have been used for the statistical analysis of the data. Frequency (f), percentage (%), mean (? ), standard deviation (ss), and Mann Whitney U test, Kruskall-Wallis test and Chisquare test for the mixed measurements have been used in this regard. The analysis within this research find that there are different practices in teaching processes of ?Orchestra and Conduction? courses in music education branches, the lecturers do not have a modern teaching program and devote too less time for activities of conduction techniques and skills. A framework program of the course has been constructed with the data that has been gathered by the literature survey and the opinions of related lecturers and students and the findings that have been obtained. A special attention in the program has been devoted to include all the elements that are supposed to be in a modern program. In order to make the course more functioning and to have a more functional structure, various measures have been proposed with the expectation of being useful for the related people in the teaching process and program developing efforts of the course.