Students’ strategy use is an assessment of their ability to assimilate, synthesize, and actualize knowledge shown to be directly related to success in sight-reading. The purpose of this exploratory, collective case study was to investigate the strategy use, and possible underlying cognitive music processes, of eighth grade middle school choral students when vocally sight-reading. More specifically, the objective of this research was to better understand the relationship between strategy use and accelerated learning in vocal music notation reading. To create a coalesced conceptual lens, I merged the construct of audiation and pertinent findings from cognitive science research, specifically music reading literature in cognitive psychology. Seeing students’ strategy use through this combined lens allowed me to concentrate on the role of cognitive processes (perception, attention, memory, audiation) in the vocal sight-reading process and begin to distill how participants’ strategies improved or reduced sight-reading performance. Fourteen eighth-grade middle school choral students participated (N = 14, 4 males, ages 13 to 14). Students participated in research activities individually, in one 30-minute session, in a nearby practice room at their middle school. I collected two types of quantitative data. First, I tallied scores from a sight-reading instrument, the Vocal Sight-Reading Inventory (Henry, 1999). Second, I categorized data from a researcher-designed Sophistication of Strategy Use Index (an accumulation of scores in five music cognition-based categories: looking behavior, chunking, long-term memory, auditory representations, and audiation). Furthermore, I gathered qualitative data through interviews, retrospective think-alouds (Ericsson & Simon, 1993), and video-stimulated recall interviews. All students employed strategies, both cognitive and non-cognitive, singularly and in combination. Three major findings emerged: 1. Students employed strategies in three domains of knowledge, visual-only (most frequent), aural-only (least frequent), and visual-aural, and two underlying systems, self-awareness and music vocabulary. 2. Those who scored in the highest 50% on the sight-reading indicator employed these strategies (two or three times) more frequently than those who scored in the lowest 50% • read in visual chunks and by analogy; • created and manipulated auditory representations; • paired singular pitches with discrete staff placement locations; • employed self-awareness in production and commission of errors; and • remained aurally grounded in the tonality. 3. There was a positive and strong correlation (r = .84, p < .00) between students’ sophistication of strategy use scores and vocal sight-reading scores. Results from the current study have implications for choral music educators in designing and implementing sight-reading curricula, especially with regards to content and pedagogy. Suggestions for sight-reading pedagogy include (a) scaffolding sight-reading instruction to guide sophisticated strategy use, (b) strengthening underlying musical cognitive processes, (c) emphasizing higher order relationships, especially chunking, and (d) increasing students’ meta-cognition surrounding vocal production and commission of errors.

The focus of this study is on the relationships among three basic auditory representations as well as their interaction with a measure of overall musicianship (sight-singing) among a group of classical and non-classical university music students (N = 112) selected from three different universities. Students were enrolled in level one of an aural skills course at the time. Basic auditory representations included were tonic centrality, measured by Colwell’s (1968) Feeling for Tonal Center, tonal grouping, measured by Colwell’s (1968) Auditory-Visual Discrimination, and harmonic function grouping, measured by a revised version of Holahan, Saunders and Goldberg’s (2000) assessment. I evaluated relationships by correlating scores on each measure and also compared these relationships among classical and non-classical music students. The participants in this study were the most skilled at forming auditory representations of tonic centrality and non-classical musicians significantly (p = .002) outperformed classical musicians in this area. Tonic centrality was also most strongly correlated with overall musicianship (τ = .45, p < .001) within the sample, and this relationship appeared to be stronger among non-classical musicians (τ = .52, p < .001) than among classical musicians (τ = .39, p < .001). This difference may be accounted for by the increased reliance on grounding in a tonal center required by the musical activities of a typical non-classical music student. Given the changing balance of musical endeavors present in tertiary music schools today (Lehmann, Sloboda, & Woody, 2007), educators are encouraged to better understand the particular strengths non-classical musicians may bring to the classroom in terms of ear-based musical abilities. Likewise, music educators on each level are encouraged to incorporate ear-based activities such as improvisation and playing by ear to the benefit of musicians of all genres.