You are watching the pupils file into your science lesson and your eyes scan across the lab: high desks, sinks and those stools that now fetch a fortune on eBay. They rest on the aprons the teenagers are grabbing form the pegs: today you are teaching a practical.

But today, you do not get that sinking feeling; you have trawled through papers and studies on how to do science practicals well, and have come up with a plan based on that and your own experience. You are confident. And 30 minutes in, things are going swimmingly.

On the other side of the school grounds, Emma is teaching a music lesson. The room is large, with chairs and instruments scattered across the floor like notes on a stave. The lesson is focused on chord progressions. Like you, Emma has done her homework: she has read and re-read studies on how to teach music through practical tasks and combined these with her experience to form a pedagogical approach. Again, things are going well.

How similar are the two lessons? How many of the principles underpinning the approaches from research in science and music lessons are comparable? Could the lessons be even better if the teachers pooled the research from their two subject disciplines into a pedagogical trifle of deliciousness? ​

It does not tend to happen in this way. More often than not, education research finds its way into classrooms like this: general findings about how a pedagogical approach impacts on learning are taken up by a teacher and applied to their particular subject context.

This is great: more informed teaching has to be a good thing; whether you actually use the research or not, just questioning your own practice is useful.

We are less keen to take lessons from educational research conducted within one specific subject. After all, just because a method of interrogating sources in history is proven to be successful, that does not necessarily mean it can help a maths teacher out with a problem-solving task, right? And given the hassle of converting that research, when there’s so much great generalist stuff out there, why bother?

We wanted to find out whether, actually, it was worth bothering. Can reading about strategies for improving students’ conceptual understanding of maths help us to become better science teachers or art teachers? Can English or PE teachers learn anything from studies on the use of space in drama? Surely these are questions worth exploring?

And explore we did. By looking at the potential of science educational research (there is loads of it) in the music classroom (where there is a lack), we, a science teacher and a music teacher, aimed to shed some light on whether we should open the research transfer window between departments.

The plan

Although there are many “practical” subjects on the curriculum, none has benefited from as much targeted educational research as science. A search on the Bodleian Library’s website yields 1,372,113 results for “practical science education”. Conversely, replacing “science” with “music” in the search field slashes the results by two-thirds.

Nevertheless, music is, we hope, clearly as practical a subject as science. If studies on practical science could be successfully applied in music, this would add significantly to the literature at music teachers’ disposal.

And if these narrowly focused studies have a broader impact in music, then maybe English, art, maths or French teachers should be interested in the findings as well.

So, we got together, identified key findings from science-practical research and tried to ascertain how applicable they were to the music classroom, and whether there were also wider benefits to be had. Here’s what we discovered.

1. The domains of ‘observables’ and ‘ideas’

Tiberghien (2000) sees practical work in science as the essential link between the domain of “observables” (things that students can see or touch, such as solids, liquids and gases) and the domain of “ideas” (things they experience indirectly, such as particles). This is something science teachers frequently state as being a key purpose of the “practical” in their own teaching (see Holman 2017).

Abrahams and Millar (2008) develop this by distinguishing between practical work effective at level 1 (what students do) and at level 2 (what students learn). They have shown that science teachers conflate what students are doing, often following recipe-like instructions, with evidence of what students are learning. Abrahams and Millar have championed a more minds-on approach to practical work, in which students are explicitly required to think, and learn, about scientific ideas during the practical activity to reinforce the link between the domain of observables and the domain of ideas.

This model is a powerful way for science teachers to evaluate their practical teaching and make it more effective. If the key learning outcome is for students to understand how to use a complex new practical technique, then links to the domain of ideas should be limited, and emphasis placed instead on checking that students have learned and understood the technique (not just copied their neighbour).

However, if the key learning outcome is a new scientific idea, students’ focus should be kept on that idea throughout, without the distraction of complex new apparatus.

Is it applicable to music teaching?

Although it is possible to distinguish between observables and ideas in music, it is challenging to focus learning in one domain at the expense of the other. Some practicals may focus exclusively on observables, such as learning the notes on a keyboard or a new rhythm on the djembe, but to produce meaningful music during independent or group work, students necessarily stray into the domain of ideas.

That said, Abrahams and Millar’s model can help teachers to direct this straying. For students to link observables and ideas in science, they need direction about which scientific ideas they will draw upon. Analogously, students cannot produce stylish music without understanding the theory or musical processes behind it. Providing stimuli for composition tasks ensures that students focus on the intended ideas, reinforcing the link between the two domains.

Broader applications

Looking at Abrahams and Millar’s distinction between level 1 and level 2 effectiveness evokes memories of teacher training: designing exhaustive lesson plans with millions of columns. But refocusing on students’ learning rather than their activity has very much been the cornerstone of recent educational dialogue (see Rosenshine 2012 and Enser 2018).

Encouraging those students who simply “go through the motions” of a task to excel can be a challenge. Teachers encounter a similar issue in maths: some students may be able to reproduce pages of perfect equations by following a given process but find they are unable to apply it in a different situation, owing to a lack of understanding.

Considering task design in terms of effectiveness at levels 1 or 2 can ensure that teachers prioritise knowing what all students are learning from the task, giving them a toolkit for identifying those students who are disguising a lack of learning by their activity.

In fact, we don’t believe the distinction between level 1 and level 2 effectiveness is specific to science-practical teaching at all: it is a thread that should run through all teachers’ reflective practice. What Abrahams and Millar provide, notwithstanding the highly science-specific exemplars utilised, is a visual tool for reflecting on the purposes and outcomes of task design, regardless of academic discipline.
 

2. ‘Micro-badging’ practical skills

With the introduction of required practicals at key stages 4 and 5, as well as hefty practical papers at A level, science teachers have looked for ways to improve students’ understanding of practical skills and techniques. “Micro-badges” give students recognition for mastery of discrete practical skills, such as measuring the volume of a liquid or wiring bulbs in parallel (see Seery 2017). A micro-badge can be physical - analogous to the badges given out in Scouts for pioneering or survival skills - or recorded digitally for students and teachers to track progress in practical work.

To complete a practical successfully, a student would generally need to weave together a number of micro-skills, some previously mastered and some still being learned. Micro-badging allows teachers to focus the learning on the skills still under construction. In Hennah and Seery’s 2017 study, students videoed themselves using and explaining a technique before they were awarded the micro-badge, and their performance in the practical exam questions improved significantly.

Is it applicable to music teaching?

While micro-badging practical skills may make sense in science teaching, such an approach is fraught with problems in music. Practical skills, such as dictation and aural recognition of modulations and cadences, are assessed in listening exams. A potential danger of micro-badging is that, once the badge is achieved, students might stop practising and these skills, which could then decline from neglect.

Furthermore, it is often difficult for students to articulate their practical skills in music with technical accuracy. Explaining how they can recognise a Phrygian cadence can be extremely difficult, unless they have perfect pitch, draw out the chords and label changes individually. Usually, students reliably recognise the cadence because they’ve heard it over and over again, or they don’t because they haven’t.

Broader applications

If English students were given a micro-badge for similes, they might cease to use them, when, in fact, we want their similes to grow in subtlety, complexity and poetry through continued experimentation. In some subjects, such as science, and design and technology, students continue to use their practical skills in various contexts within lessons, and cannot practise them outside the classroom anyway. But in music, and elsewhere, the focus should be on constant, independent practice, rather than on micro-badging every new skill.

So, while micro-badging may help science teachers to improve the efficacy of their practical lessons, this research doesn’t transfer well to the general. There is clearly something specific about the nature of practical skills in science that allows them to be distilled into discrete units and mastered individually, which is not appropriate in most other subjects.

In contrast, the benefits of students articulating their ideas and understanding may well apply to a general case successfully. However, the challenges associated with students explaining their aural recognition in music suggest that it does not have an equal impact in all cases.
 

3. Pre-activity tasks

The pre-lab activity has come back into fashion. These are scene-setting activities that students do before they start working on a practical, with the aim of making it more effective. A number of criteria for designing successful pre-labs have been identified in the literature (see Agustian and Seery 2017):

• Provide students with an overview.

• Emphasise supportive rather than procedural information - not how to do it but the why and the theory behind it.

• Impact on the affective domain (the emotional aspect, such as a student’s motivation or feelings about the subject).

We both recognise that pre-lab tasks (which we’ll give the subject-neutral title “pre-activity” tasks) are critical in facilitating effective practical work across the curriculum, and we have our own strategies for setting up students’ activities. But how well do these overlap with the recommended criteria for pre-activity tasks in science?

Let’s look at the three criteria. When designing a pre-activity task, Agustian and Seery emphasise the importance of students viewing the practical as a whole. This could be by sequencing the steps into an appropriate order or planning how long to spend on each.

They also stress that having students focus on supportive information - which helps to contextualise the practical - rather than procedural information is key to designing effective pre-activity tasks in science. This means linking the upcoming practical to underlying theory, such as by students making predictions about what might be observed in a science practical, based on theoretical ideas.

Finally, impact on the affective domain: this motivates students to carry out the practical to the best of their ability. Both the overview and the supportive information can motivate students, because they make producing excellent work seem realisable. But a pre-activity task can also make the main activity seem exciting (a dramatic chemical reaction) or purposeful (solving an interesting scientific question), ensuring that students understand why they are doing the practical.

Is it applicable to music teaching?

Let’s look at the three criteria again. Viewing the practical as a whole is particularly pertinent to composition tasks. Compositions change and evolve throughout the creative process, but it is important for students to start with a structural overview: are they composing a rondo, minuet and trio, or sonata form? What key are they composing in? Where will it modulate?

Equally, in music, setting the stage within the domain of ideas required before a practical task is essential for students to produce stylish compositions, in terms of style or genre, as discussed above.

Finally, pre-activity tasks: they are just as applicable here, for example, hearing an exemplar in music may inspire students to create something beautiful of their own.

Broader applications

The need for an overview is echoed across the curriculum, with students planning history essays, blocking out scenes in drama, or producing a Gantt chart to manage their extended project qualification. We’ve all seen students crippled by a blank piece of paper. Furthermore, these preliminary preparations give the project a finite tangibility, which motivates the students during the task (positively impacting on the affective domain).

Similarly, emphasising supportive information seems to be ubiquitously good advice: reading some stoic philosophy sets the scene for studying Cicero versus Verres in Classics, and studying Elizabethan politics illuminates Shakespeare’s satire in Hamlet. The supportive pre-activity task encourages higher-quality work. Finally, seeing a play in the West End, reading a poem or visiting a gallery can get students’ creative juices flowing as a pre-activity task.

But it needn’t have such a dramatic effect to be effective: simply making the task seem achievable is often the best motivation.

Indeed, we believe that these criteria can help teachers to plan pre-activity tasks for all subjects, regardless of whether the lesson is obviously “practical”. In fact, the rigmarole of setting up a practical virtually necessitates pre-activity tasks, but they can easily be neglected when students begin a sedate, independent activity. Improved student outcomes when activities have been thoughtfully set up remind us to make the time for this stage in our planning.

4. Integrated instruction

Instead of providing “recipes” of text for students to follow, integrated instructions include visual prompts, which can eliminate unnecessary teacher instructions, and repetition when setting up and carrying out a task.

This technique is in vogue among the cognitive science folk (#CogSciSci on Twitter) as a means of reducing students’ cognitive load during the task, so the focus is on the material they are actually supposed to be learning.

Researchers have found that, when students had integrated instructions, compared with standard text-based instructions, they completed the task in less time, performed better and scored higher in later assessments: all great outcomes in our practical teaching (see Haslam and Hamilton 2010).

Is it applicable to music teaching?

Similarly to how integrated instructions are used in science, when asking Year 8 to compose a variation on a theme, you could provide a keyboard guide and note letters on the music. This would ensure that the students focused on the compositional process rather than working out the notation.

Integrated instructions support students with procedural matters, eliminating questions such as “What is this note here?” or “How can I connect this circuit?”, and encouraging a more independent approach.

The work on integrated instructions can provide teachers, in science and in music, with a means of ensuring that the students are being challenged by the learning and not by the doing: essentially that practical teaching is effective at Abrahams and Millar’s level 2 and not limited to level 1.

Broader applications

This technique is certainly applicable across the board and this is not surprising: the initial research on cognitive load theory, which inspired the integrated instruction movement, was always intended to have a general application across academic disciplines. This is really an instance of a bigger educational theory rather than a distinct idea.

So, science and music teachers should be co-planning?

Don’t worry, the answer to this question is definitely “no”. But the promise shown by applying educational research from science to music demonstrates the general principle that, sometimes, it is possible to go from one narrow context out to a bigger picture and then zoom into another niche.

We should, of course, be wary of moving from the particular to the general: there is no guarantee that what works in science will definitely apply in music, as the pitfalls of micro-badging demonstrate, but drawing on a wider range of literature can substantially enrich our professional learning.

While it’s ludicrous to expect busy teachers to consume educational literature from other subjects regularly, we can share our domain-specific learning with colleagues in other areas and hope that they are inspired to reciprocate. We should be discussing educational ideas across departments, finding out what others have been influenced by recently and experimenting with promising ideas in our own classrooms.

Highly specialised research may, in fact, say something prescient about the general. And to figure it out, you just need to be open to the unexpected.

Elizabeth Bathurst is a music teacher at St Catherine’s School in Surrey and Emily Seeber is head of science at Bedales School in Hampshire

This article originally appeared in the 22 February 2019 issue under the headline “Research: the greatest hits”