ABSTRACTAN INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HOME MUSIC ENVIRONMENTS AND MUSIC APTITUDES OF KINDERGARTEN STUDENTSByMichael John RomanikThe purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the home music environments and the music aptitudes of kindergarten students. The specific research problems were: (1) to determine the nature of the home music environments of kindergarten students, and (2) to determine the relationships between the home music environments and the music aptitudes of kindergarten students. The subjects of this study were 289 children who had just started kindergarten. During the Fall of 2015, the Parent/Guardian Survey Regarding Kindergarten Music (PSRKM) was distributed to all of the parents of these children. Two hundred eight of these surveys were returned and analyzed to provide a measurement of these children’s home music environments. PSRKM had a Cronbach’s alpha of .91. Returned surveys indicated that parents engaged in a variety of different music activities with their children, and that parents strongly supported music and music education. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on PSRKM (p=.003). In addition, all of the children took Primary Measures of Music Audiation (PMMA) to measure their music aptitudes. Unfortunately, the Cronbach’s alphas were unacceptably low for PMMA, with reliabilities of .67, .42, and .67, for the tonal, rhythm, and composite aptitudes, respectively. These low reliabilities invalidated the small, yet significant correlations that were found between individual items from PSRKM and tonal and composite aptitudes. Significant differences related to age were found for rhythm aptitude (p=.001) and composite aptitude (p=.011).
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