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Transforming Music Education with iSCORE

Dr. Rena Upitis

Dr. Rena Upitis and her research partners, Ms. Angela Ester of The Royal Conservatory and Dr. Philip Abrami of Concordia University, have been awarded a SSHRC Partnership Grant and a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Leader’s Opportunity Fund grant for their project Transforming music education with a web-based portfolio tool. Additional funding from partners and collaborators brings the project total to over $3 million.

iSCORE, the first electronic portfolio designed to support music education, was developed on the basis of the team's research into effective ways to inspire and empower people to learn music. It supports music-making with a wide range of features, including a personalized homepage that enables students to set goals and priorities, an embedded recorder and online portfolio allowing students to record and save practices and performances, links to composition and sequencing tools, interactive plans, and feedback from teachers.

iSCORE was released in January, 2012, and teachers and music instructors are already using the free on-line tool. It is expected to reach thousands of teachers and tens of thousands students through The Royal Conservatory's professional development programs and its 300 Canadian and 90 US examination centres.

Learning more about the use of iSCORE and making it available widely throughout North America are the main foci for the research team's 5-year SSHRC-funded project.

Long-term funding for the project,” says Dr. Upitis, "will enable us to conduct a national study on the use of iSCORE in music education, to develop curriculum supports and teacher professional development modules, and to make the tool more widely available."

The CFI funding, Dr. Upitis explains, will enable the team to purchase the equipment for the project: "But it's more than just equipment for the researchers: it's laptops for the studio teachers who will be taking part - a very important way of not only enabling the research, but for compensating the studio teachers involved."

The equipment for the research project includes two Disklaviers (digital pianos), one of which will be at Queen's, and the other at Wilfrid Laurier University. The Disklaviers will allow the Queen’s researchers to develop digital curriculum materials and to share them with their colleagues teaching at Wilfrid Laurier.

In addition to Disklaviers for the researchers and the laptops for teachers, the CFI funding will support the creation of a Living Music Library “filled with digital resources created by and for music teachers," says Dr. Upitis.

Dr. Upitis will steer the research on the use of the electronic portfolio in studios and classrooms. Using an experimental design, the researchers will compare 24 studios in three Canadian urban centres where iSCORE is used with 24 studios that do not employ an electronic portfolio. Research participants will include studio teachers, students, and parents.

Concordia University will use the research findings to refine the software throughout the life of the project. A concurrent project led by The Royal Conservatory will use the knowledge generated through research to support teachers through professional development opportunities.

The partnership aims to transform music education across North America, as "the digital nature of the tool allows the benefits to extend to students from urban centres to rural and remote communities."

Moreover, Dr. Upitis states that, “If the project proves successful, iSCORE may also be distributed through the conservatory systems in Europe and Asia, linking musicians and their teachers around the globe.”

Congratulations to Dr. Upitis and her team for making Canada an international leader in new digital tools that support music education.

For additional stories on iSCORE, please see:

Children playing music on recorders.