Examination of the attitudes of the music-teaching department?s students towards ?Traditional Turkish Music Courses? in terms of various variables

The purpose of the present study is to examine the attitudes of the fourth-year students at the Department of Music Teaching at the Faculty of Education towards ?Traditional Turkish Music Courses?. Within the framework of this basic purpose, this study is designed to examine the attitudes of the fourth-year students at the Department of Music Teaching at the Faculty of Education towards the courses of TTFM (Traditional Turkish Folk Music) and TTAM (Traditional Turkish Art Music) in terms of various variables and to find out whether there is a significant relationship between them.This study is a research conducted as a survey to determine the attitudes of the students at the Department of Music Teaching towards TTFM and TTAM. The universe of the study consists of the students enrolled at the 23 Departments of Music Teaching affiliated to The Council of Higher Education in Turkey. The sample of the study is composed of the fourth-year students at 22 Departments of Music Teaching.In the study, a questionnaire form composed of two parts has been used as a tool of collecting data. In the first part of the questionnaire form, there are 9 questions concerning the personal information of the students and in the second part, there is an Attitude-Scale for Traditional Turkish Music (TTFM-TTAM), developed by the researcher and composed of 24 items. The Scale consists of 24 questions ? 9 negative and 15 positive. It is one-dimensional and the variance explained by the single factor has been found as 40% and the coefficient of reliability (Cronbach Alpha) as 0,93.This study has been conducted with 202 students currently enrolled in the fourth-year at the Department of Music Teaching during 2009-2010 training year from the four universities randomly selected for pre-application (validity-reliability study of the scale developed). Then we have made contacts with 451 students from the remaining 18 universities during 2009-2010 training year for the real application (after the validity-reliability study of the scale).In this study, firstly, whether the data conformed to the normal distribution with Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was assessed. In the cases in which the items in the scale had a normal distribution, Independent Samples t-test was used in the comparison of two groups and One-Way ANOVA was used in the comparison of more than two groups. In the cases in which the dimensions in the scale did not have a normal distribution or the number of observations was low, Mann-Whitney U-test was used in the comparison of two groups and Kruskal-Wallis H was used in the comparison of more than two groups. The level of significance was found as 0,05. For the analyses in the study, SPSS 18.0 (PASW 18.0), WINKS and LISREL package programs were used.The study concluded that the students had a high positive score of attitude to the courses of TTFM and TTAM and there was not a significant difference between the attitudes to these two courses. The students? attitudes to the courses of Traditional Turkish Music showed considerable differences, depending on their genders, their high-schools, their current universities, individual instruments and groups of instruments, their favourite music, their settlement places, the kind of music frequently listened to in the family and the educational status of the parents. In the light of these findings, suggestions were made about the scientific studies that would be conducted in the future.