Effect of music education activities with game and dance content on self-esteem levels of children in 9-10 age group

Considering the effect of music education on the development of children, it constitutes the main aim of this research to investigate whether music education activities with game and dance content have an effect on the self-esteem of children in the 9-10 age group. In this study based on a mixed method and where both quantitative and qualitative methods are used together, the embedded design was used. While the quantitative dimension of the research consisted of an experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group where the effect of music education curriculum prepared by the researcher by obtaining expert opinions on the self-esteem of children in the 9-10 age group with low self-esteem levels, the qualitative dimension consisted of case study design. The experiment-control groups were created by the random assignment method and the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory was applied to 96 children in the 9-10 age group at the 3rd and 4th grades in a private primary school in Malatya, and 30 children with low self-esteem levels whose scores were close to each other were selected. The children in the experimental group were applied a music education curriculum developed by the researcher by obtaining expert opinions and based on active learning with modern teaching methods for two hours per week for 10 weeks. The subjects in the control group were not applied any practice. At the end of the 10-week program, the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory was applied to the students in the experimental and control groups again as a posttest. Qualitative data were obtained from the interviews conducted with the parents and class teachers of only the children in the experimental group. In the statistical analyses, the conformity of the data to normality before the analysis was tested with the Shapiro-Wilk test, and it was found that the pretest and posttest data for the self-esteem levels of the experimental and control groups were normally distributed. In line with this finding, it was considered appropriate to apply parametric statistical techniques in the research. The two-way ANOVA test was used for repeated measurements to test whether music education activities with game and dance content had a statistically significant effect on the self-esteem levels of children. Line and distribution graphs of the obtained scores were created, and comparisons were made over these graphs. The obtained qualitative data were analyzed by the content analysis technique. According to the quantitative posttest results of the study, it was found that music education activities with game and dance content had a significant positive effect on the total, general and academic self-esteem levels of the children in the experimental group, but no significant change was observed in social and home-family self-esteem levels. It was observed that total, general, academic, social and home-family self-esteem scores of the students in the control group decreased slightly. A majority of the parental opinions in the obtained qualitative data suggested that music education activities with game and dance content provided much improvement on the behaviors of the children and that there was an increase in their general, academic, social and home-family self-esteem levels. A large proportion of the opinions of the teachers suggested that music education activities with game and dance content provided positive development on the behaviors of the children in many ways and that there was an increase in the general, academic and social self-esteem levels of the children but no change was observed in their home-family self-esteem levels. Keywords: Games, Dance, Music Education, Self-Esteem