An investigation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of computer-aided instruction in middle school choral programs

The purpose of this study was to determine how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the use of computer-aided instruction (CAI) in Texas middle school choral classrooms. Participants (n=23), Texas middle school choral directors, were asked to complete a researcher-designed survey about their demographics and their use of CAI in the classroom both pre-March 2020 and post-March 2020. Results indicated that CAI use increased after March 2020, with Flipgrid, Chrome Music Lab, Sight Reading Factory, iTunes, Garageband, and Mustheory.net being the most frequently used CAI in their respective categories. Participants considered tracking student progress as the greatest challenge to using CAI. Almost 70% of participants had less than one year’s experience using CAI and 50% had been required to teach in-person, synchronously, and asynchronously simultaneously. Future studies could determine if the increased use of CAI in music classrooms extends to other areas of music and if music teachers will continue to incorporate CAI in the post-pandemic period.