Teachers’ Understanding of Music Education and Early Childhood Learning Outcomes: Evidence from Arjasari District

Abstract

Music education occupies a structurally marginal position in early childhood education (ECE), where cognitive-literacy objectives routinely displace aesthetic development in both curriculum design and everyday teaching practice. This study examined the relationship between ECE teachers’ understanding of music education and the quality of early childhood learning in Arjasari District, West Java, Indonesia. A quantitative correlational design was applied to a sample of 78 kindergarten (Raudhatul Athfal) teachers drawn from a population of 103 through proportional random sampling, using a 28-item Likert questionnaire validated through Pearson product-moment correlation (all items r > .223) and Cronbach’s alpha (α = .946). Simple linear regression indicated a statistically significant association between teachers’ musical understanding and reported learning quality (β = 0.538, t = 11.187, p < .001), with musical understanding accounting for 62.2% of variance in the outcome measure (R² = .622). Teachers scored higher on awareness of music’s developmental importance than on knowledge of age-appropriate musical repertoire, while children’s appreciative engagement with peers’ work outstripped their productive, creative music-making. These findings extend the largely conceptual and qualitative literature on ECE music pedagogy by supplying region-specific quantitative estimates, and they expose the methodological ceiling that single-informant, cross-sectional designs impose on claims of directional influence. Teacher musical understanding functions here as a necessary but insufficient condition for quality music learning, one likely mediated by institutional resourcing, professional development access, and repertoire knowledge that the present design cannot disentangle. Implications for teacher preparation and future mixed-methods research in Indonesian ECE settings are discussed.