COPING WITH THE PERFORMANCE ANXIETY AMONG MUSIC EDUCATION STUDENTS: A METHOD TRIAL

It has been perceived as a problem by both the students and the teaching staff that in music education, students experience low performance during the performance exam. In this research, it has been aimed to find out whether the performance anxiety that the music education students suffer could be reduced by the techniques such as proper breathing, relaxation etc. or not. Randomly chosen 48 (forty-eight) students having education in the Department of Music Education took part in the first stage of the research. 36 of those 48 students took part in the second stage of the research. Saliva samples of the students which were taken just before, during and at the end of the piano exam which the students performed before a jury at the end of the term in June 2011 in order to determine the cortisol level that increases with excitement were analyzed. Thus, the ideas of the students about how they felt physically and psychologically just before and during the exam were obtained via a questionnaire. After the piano exam that the saliva samples were taken from the students, the students were informed of the methods how to cope with the performance anxiety many times until the piano exam at the end of the term in January 2012. In the piano exam before the jury in January 2012, saliva samples were taken again in the same way and the results were compared with the previous saliva test results using the chi-square test. It has been detected that the cortisol levels decreased in the second measure.