Effects of Self-Assessment and Successive Approximations on “Knowing” and “Valuing” Selected Keyboard Skills

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to investigate the relationship between college students' perceptions of “knowing” and “valuing” five selected skills on the piano, and (2) to determine whether a successive-approximations approach to learning the skills plus selfe-evaluation would affect students' perceptions of “knowing” and “valuing ” Thirty-two music majors enrolled in piano classes served as subjects for this investigation, which was a pretest-posttest design and covered one academic semester (15 weeks). Results indicated that students' self-evaluations were strongly correlated to their posttest perceptions of “knowing” and that knowledge and valuing became more closely associated following specific instructional and self-assessment procedures. An important aspect of this study was that it defined five areas of keyboard instruction that could be broken down into smaller, observable units before demonstration of the whole skill.