Developing vocal music assessment schedule: An analysis in synchrony to the current systems in Kenyan universities

Abstract

This paper sought to address the process through which universities in Kenya assess vocal music performance. The analysis was drawn against a checklist of 19 items that sought to develop a schedule that synchronizes with other schedules to help evaluate vocal music performance objectively. Purposive sampling was used to consider 12 universities offering music where 6 universities were randomly selected for participation in the study. Students of music were selected using stratified random sampling to acquire gender representation before simple random sampling technique was used to acquire the actual sample size n=30%. The study was guided by Constructive Alignment model(Biggs, 2003) as the theoretical underpinning. Data was collected using opinionnaires, questionnaires, focus group discussion, and observation schedule. Analyzed data was then presented in summarized tables and themes for content analysis. The students’ vocal evaluation and assessment schedules varied in the sampled universities as well as the capacity of music instructors to assess rhythmic accuracy, tempo, sight singing, tone, intonation, melodic accuracy, vocal technique, musicianship and synthesis analysis, historical and cultural context which formed the key elements of evaluation in the universities. The study concludes vocal music scores and evaluation schedules should be analyzed based on the developed schedule.