The evaluation of music teaching undergraduate program students' adequacies that are obtained in "special teaching methods" courses in terms of their usage in "teaching practice"

The aim of this research is to state the present situation of the education process of the course ?Special Teaching Methods? in the Music Education Branches of Fine Arts Department at Education Faculties, and to contribute to the process to be more functioning and to have more functional structure by investigating in what extent these courses prepare the students for ?Teaching Practice?.The design used for this research is based on a descriptive method. The sample of this research consists of the lecturers who work in the Music Education Branches of Education Faculties and who gave ?Special teaching Methods I-II? courses and the students who attended to these courses in 2006-7 academic year. Within this research an evaluation model has been developed based on the experts? observations and the opinions of last year students who study in the Music Education Branches for the evaluation of ?Special Teaching Methods I-II? courses for ?Teaching Practice? in the institutions that educate students to be music teachers. The composition of the dimensions of application has been tried to be determined by the applied studies within the subsequent four months. In this regard, the content, teaching and functionality of the ?Special teaching Methods I-II? courses and the effects of these courses fort he course ?Teaching Practice?, and the opinions of the students on what extent these courses are able to prepare for music teaching occupation, and the observations fort he ?Teaching Practice? have been analysed separately, as well as together within the relationships with each other.The data related to the problems that are analysed in this research have been obtained within the ?Interview Form?, which is constructed for the evaluation model based on the experts? opinions on teaching program of the course ?Special teaching Methods I-II?, ?Questionnaire Form? for the opinions of last year students on the course ?Special teaching Methods I-II?, ?Observation Form? and ?Investigation form of Daily Plan Form? which investigate the reflections of these courses on ?Teaching Practice? course which covers the application process of these courses.ivVarious statistical analysis techniques within the SPSS software package have been used for the statistical analysis of the data. Frequency (f), percentage (%), mean (?), standard deviation (sd), and Chi-square test for the countable data have been used in this regard.The measurable variables are shown not to be normal distributed according to Shopiro Wilk normality test (p>0,05). Therefore, non parametric tests such as Kruskall-Wallis, variance analysis and Mann Whitney U test have been applied. Statistical significance level has been determined as 0.05.The results of the analysis in this research indicates that the knowledge obtained by the students in ?Special teaching Methods I-II? courses is not converted to the desired behaviours by the music teacher candidates, music teaching methods have not been learnt sufficiently, although the candidates believe that they are sufficient for teaching music, they are not sufficient in ?Teaching Practice?, the necessary attention is not devoted for the planning stage of the courses in practice.According to these findings, the importance of the review, organisation and improvement of the programs of ?Special Teaching Methods I-II? courses in the institutions that educate music teachers has been emphasised and the necessity of further studies in this subject have been proposed.Key Words: Music Teaching, special teaching methods, teaching practice, music teaching methods.