Examining high school students' music theory knowledge

Music education has an important role in the shaping and development of societies as it is a valuable part of the accumulation that has been going on since the emergence of cultural wealth. Although the individual's introduction to music begins in the prenatal period in the mother's womb, the first encounter with music professionally is through music lessons applied in schools. This research shows that the subjects and achievements related to music theory that are being taught in high schools within the scope of music lessons are in the 9th, 10th , 11th, and 12th grades. And it aims to reveal at what level and how it is perceived by the students of these grades. In the study, data were collected through the "Music Theory Evaluation Questionnaire". For the survey, the creation of the questionnaire, the items were started to be created within the scope of the literature and High School annual lesson plans, with the surface validity by taking the opinions of the field experts and the content validity in line with the expert opinions, 25 in the 9th grade survey, 16 in the 10th grade survey, 32 in the 11th grade survey and 7 in the 12th grade survey item was terminated. Participants (n=2058) were asked to express their opinions by selecting one of the "Yes", "Partially" and "No" options. In the demographic information section of the survey, participants were asked about "gender, maternal education level, paternal education level, whether they play an instrument, whether they take part in a musical activity outside of school". In the data analysis, the frequencies and percentages of the data collected within the scope of the survey were calculated. The obtained data were also performed in Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between the opinion expressed by the participants in terms of demographic variables. As a result of the data analysis, when the results obtained from the findings were evaluated, there was a significant difference in all grade levels (9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades) in the knowledge levels of music theory according to the gender of the participants, and that the music theory knowledge level of the participants who stated that they played a musical instrument did not play an instrument. The level of music theory knowledge of the participants who stated that they had a musical instrument player in their family was higher than those who stated that they did not have an instrument player in their family. It was concluded that the music theory knowledge level of the participants who stated that they took part in a music activity other than music lessons at school was higher than those who stated that they were not involved in music activities.