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This thesis explores the development of sensitivity to musical styles in children aged between 3 and 16 years old. The thesis is divided into four parts. The first part of the thesis explores the historical background of the developmental and the social psychology of music and reviews some pertinent previous literature. This section places the later studies in a theoretical context. The second part presents a review of the four previous studies, which have been carried out into style sensitivity, namely, Gardner (1973), Castell (1983), Tafuri et al. (1994) and Hargreaves and North (1999). This section of the thesis also includes a review of a number of methodological issues and gives a full description of the design of the test methodology. Six experiments are carried out and reported in the thesis. Experiment one explores the effect of varying the lesson context in which the style sensitivity test is presented to the participants, whilst experiment two explores the effect of varying the test presenter on participants' test performance. The third experiment is a comparative study between participants in three different regions, one region within the UK and two regions within the USA. The participants in each of these three regions all experienced a number of variations in their music education programme, the status accorded to music within that music education programme and also considerable variation in participants' commercial musical diet. The experiment explores whether or not these variations affect the development of sensitivity to musical styles. Part three of the thesis manipulates two further variables firstly, by varying the introduction to the style sensitivity and secondly, by manipulating the musical material used in the test. Experiment four presents two variations to the test introduction. In the first condition the introduction is changed through the offer of a reward and in the second condition, the introduction is changed in order to make the experiment competitive. The fifth experiment attempts to manipulate the musical material used in the style sensitivity test by increasing the level of stylistic divergence between the musical extracts. This is achieved in two ways. Firstly, a broad grained method of measuring various artefactual elements within the extracts is devised and incorporated into the selection of the musical test material. Secondly, the stylistic divergence between the musical extracts in increased by extending the chronological period between the musical eras used in the musical extracts. Part four presents the findings of an exploratory study. Experiment six attempted to create a new test methodology which was appropriate for use on younger children. The new methodology was successfully piloted in order to further explore style sensitivity in participants aged between 3 and 5 years of age. In the last section, a review of the six experiments is given and this is accompanied by a number of implications for further research. Finally, a model of the development of style sensitivity is presented. This model proposes that sensitivity to musical style is not a single unitary skill, the development of which is linear, and therefore any measurement of musical style sensitivity should be seen as a multidimensional description of a combination of abilities, skills and knowledge. The model proposes that acquiring the ability to be sensitive to musical styles can best be seen as the progression from stylistic discrimination to stylistic competence.

This research investigated the culture and identity of art and design institutions through making comparisons between British and Chinese independent art schools and art schools in multidisciplinary universities, and the cultural contexts behind these art schools in the two countries. The study employed a semi-structured and open-ended qualitative interview approach, and adopted cross-national research as a framework. Mergers between independent specialist art and design institutions and multidisciplinary universities in the UK and China were examined as a starting point to make the comparison between the two types of art schools. Thirty participants from independent art schools, art schools within large universities, and other non-art and design faculties in universities both in the UK and China were interviewed. The analysis of the qualitative interview data was informed by certain concepts such as culture and identity. The thesis explored the concept of culture in two different senses. The first sense of culture, uncovered in the interview data, matched the “organisational culture” found in the organisational studies literature. The thesis used this concept of culture as a framework to evaluate the organisational culture in independent art schools and art schools in large universities. The second, more productive, meaning of the word culture drew on the Western European and Chinese history of ideas, particularly Romanticism, which had its own manifestations in both Western and Chinese cultures. In this sense, the concept of culture was adopted to investigate and compare the history of art and design higher education, through an analysis of terminology such as “art”, “craft” and “design” in the two countries, and their origin in the Western romantic ethic summed up in the idea of bohemian ethic and the Chinese traditional romantic culture of Neo-Taoism. As a consequence of this analysis, the identity of art and design schools became clear. The concept of identity found in organisational management, which refers to Soenen and Moingeon’s five-facet model of collective identity, informed the data analysis. The identity of art and design schools can be encapsulated in another productive term developed through the thesis: the concept of the “real art school”. The “real art school” is an intangible concept that relates to the core belief and deep value in the art school identity: the bohemian spirit. It does not matter whether the school is independent or merged. As long as it has a sense of this bohemian identity, then it is a real art school.

UNESCO (2006b) proclaims that' Arts Education is a universal human right'. However, art educators have observed that Western visual arts education is still dominated by a culturally exclusive canon of artworks which some students find alienating and irrelevant. Calls to abandon the canon in the name of inclusion have been made by school arts educators and research in secondary schools has shown that including contemporary art in the curriculum can empower and engage learners. However, inclusive visual arts curriculum development in higher education is infrequently explored. This thesis is intended to address such imbalance. It reports the findings of a mixed methods study exploring the impact of adults' affective and cognitive responses to art on their learning. A questionnaire and interviews were used to gather information about Open University undergraduates' responses to contemporary and non-contemporary artworks and their experiences of studying a visual arts module featuring meta-cognitive scaffolding and guided reflection. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data indicated that while the Western canon has the power to exclude, replacing canonical works with contemporary art is not a 'one size fits all' solution to achieving educational inclusion. Rather, it appears there is an age and experience-related divide in adults' affective and cognitive responses to art. Younger, and art-trained adults often relish studying provocative, emotionally potent and offensive contemporary artworks, especially works addressing topics they feel are personally relevant. In contrast, some older adults' cynical preconceptions about contemporary art's unworthiness for serious study, and preferences for visually pleasing, inoffensive artworks, can prevent productive engagement with contemporary art. However, the study findings suggest that meta-cognitive scaffolding can offer a structure within which students can reflect on and make sense of their responses to contemporary art, while also developing the skills to interpret works with unstable and controversial meanings.

Music, as part of the National Curriculum, is a compulsory subject of study for all pupils until the age of 14. Listening to music is an important part of adolescent leisure time, music can be a powerful identifier of youth culture and yet, few pupils associate their commitment to, or enjoyment of music, with the classroom context. 93% of pupils opt out of classroom music as soon as they are given the choice (Bray 2000). The question remains 'why?' Case studies in three secondary schools were carried out with a total sample of 249 Year 9 pupils. Pupils described their experiences of Key Stage 3 classroom music during interviews. Pupils completed questionnaires in which they described their own musical ability and the skills required to achieve in GCSE Music. Patterns in pupil responses across the population were identified and used to describe seven types of musical engagement. The tendency for a pupil to engage with Key Stage 3 Music was linked to (i) the pupil- teacher relationship, (ii) perceived task-based competency, (iii) perception of risk, (iv) peer support, (v) the dominant school-based genre. As a result of these findings a model of adolescent musical identity in school and other contexts was proposed that related the inter-personal perspective of the pupil's experience (Musics available to me) to an intra-personal perspective in which the individual forms a personal relationship with specific musical encounters (Me, and My music). It is proposed, that for many pupils, it is the 'goodness of fit' between the classroom experiences and 'Me and My music' that will determine the pupils' decisions to engage with the Key Stage 3 music classroom.

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