Instrument education, which constitutes an important dimension of professional music education, includes a process in which psychomotor learning is at the forefront as well as cognitive and affective learning. This study aimed to determine the use of learning strategies of music teacher candidates receiving string instrument education in Individual Instrument Training courses and to examine their level of learning strategy use according to gender grade level and instrument type. The study consisted of 51 teacher candidates enrolled at Şanlıurfa Harran University’s Music Teacher Training Program in the Faculty of Education. Employing the survey design, the study used the “Scale of Violin Education Learning Strategies” developed by Afacan (2018) to collect the data. The reliability of this six-factor scalewas found to be 0.961 for the present study. Since the study data showed normal distribution, parametric tests were used in data analysis. The study results revealed that teacher candidates “Often” used rehearsal (repetition), elaboration and comprehension monitoring strategies, “Sometimes” used attention and organization strategies, and “Rarely” used affective strategies. In addition, significant differences were found between the learning strategy use, and the gender and grade level. The use of learning strategies did not differ according to the instrument the teacher candidates were receiving training for. The results were evaluated by comparing them with the results of research in the literature, and recommendations were provided towards the use of learning strategies in string instrument education in line with the findings of the study.
Music teacher candidate, string instrument training, learning strategies