ONE OF THE OBJECTIVES of the elementary music program is to foster the musical understanding of each individual child by helping him to organize the musical experiences comprising the music curriculum which he undergoes. In view of this objective the writer has long questioned the paradoxical dearth of research studies designed to determine how a child organizes his musical experiences. Some research studies concerning the musical abilities of children have been conducted by psychologists, but these are rarely cited in the elementary music literature as a basis for existing practices in elementary music education. About two years ago the writer became involved with the research of Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, in the areas of concept formation and the development of thought processes in children. If a child's musical learning is inseparable from other learnings and follows the same general patterns of development, it seemed obvious that music education might benefit from an application of Piaget's theory to musical development. From a consideration of several approaches to the problem evolved plans for a pilot study to investigate the relevance of Piaget's principle of conservation to musical learning.
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Marilyn Pflederer (1964) studied this question.