


















































Journal of Green Learning


Journal of Green Learning, e-ISSN 2807-890X 

Vol. 2, No. 2, 2022, pp. 100-105.  
DOI: 10.53889/jgl.v2i2.120 

-------------------------------------------------------- 

 

Piano Rhythmic Exercise for Preschool Education Major 

Teaching at Taiyuan Teacher College 
 

Wen Jing
1
, Pramote Danprdit

1
 

 
1
Department of Music, Faculty of Music, Bangkokthonburi University, Thailand 

 

Article Info  ABSTRACT 

Article history: 

Received  May 21, 2022 

Revised    July 12, 2022 

Accepted  August 27, 2022 

 

 
The purpose of this paper is to create piano rhythm exercises 

and to study the evaluation results after use. The researcher 

designed the research as experimental research, consisting of a 

single set of experiments verifying the consistency and 

effectiveness of the tool. The researchers created and 

developed piano rhythm exercises with three experts in an 

experiment with 22 piano beginners majoring in preschool 

education. The study was conducted from September to 

December 2021 at Taiyuan Teacher College. Results showed 

that the creation of the piano rhythm exercises course is 

effective; it consists of 9 weeks of teaching, 3 weeks of 

examination, and concludes with 12 weeks of using 9 etudes 

and 6 children's songs. In the evaluation performance results, 

the average scores of the 3 tests were 27.45, 28.77, 33.16 

respectively and the percentage scores were 68.64, 71.93, 82.9 

respectively. However, after the test, the students who 

participated in the activity felt fun, were willing to practice, 

and, of course, had higher skills. All students request a practice 

file for further use. 
 

Keywords: 

Piano  

Preschool  

Rhythmic-Exercise 

Teacher education 

 

This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license. 

 

Corresponding Author: 

Pramote Danprdit 

Department of Music 

Faculty of Music 

Bangkokthonburi university  

Thailand 

Email: 6350112003mu@gmail.com 

 

1. INTRODUCTION  

 The Taiyuan Preschool Teachers’ College is a full-time public kindergarten normal 

college approved by the People’s Government of Shanxi Province on March 23, 2018, and 

registered by the Ministry of Education on May 10, 2018. It is an important base for Shanxi 

Province and Taiyuan City to train teachers in preschool education and art education. The 

school has a total of 322 full-time teachers, including 64 full-time teachers with titles of 

associate senior or above, accounting for 19.9% of the total. There were 197 full-time teachers 

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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with master's degrees or above, accounting for 61.2%. In the first year of 2018, the enrollment 

plan has been maintained at about 2,700 students for three consecutive years, covering 16 

provinces in China. The Preschool education major at Taiyuan Preschool Teachers College is 

a high-level key major in Shanxi vocational education. This major is to train "Chong DE, the 

architect and the relevant" outstanding teachers in pre-school education, namely to build a 

first-class, domestic advanced preschool teacher training base in the province, as the goal is to 

cultivate high-quality, theoretically solid, professional skills and professionals in childcare 

facilities engaged in conservation and interdisciplinary talents education. 

  The piano course is a compulsory professional course for students majoring in 

preschool education, and it is also a basic teaching skill that students must master. Most of the 

higher vocational preschools students majoring in education have zero foundation before 

entering the school (Chang, 2016). How do you lay a solid foundation for students with zero 

piano foundation to learn the piano in a relatively short period of time? This requires piano 

teachers to effectively cultivate students in four aspects of music: music reading habits; 

rhythm cultivation; playing posture; and music cultivation (Xianjun, 2019). 

  Rhythm is the basic factor of music structure, the backbone of melody can be called 

the first element. One of the most basic training methods in music training is the cultivation of 

the sense of rhythm, which is also the premise and basis of training students to have a good 

sense of music. In music teaching, teaching about rhythm is everywhere; for example, in 

solfeggio training ear lessons, instrumental music lessons, vocal music lessons, and 

percussion lessons (Ruixue, 2011). Rhythm training is an important part of training music 

auditory ability. Rhythm is the lifeblood of music. It is the framework of music. Rhythm is 

the heart of music. It is the cornerstone of music’s flow. Music can be made up of cadences 

without a pitch, but not only of pitches without rhythm. Therefore, in order to understand 

music and music, we must start with the rhythmic rhythm, and the rhythmic rhythm is easier 

to accept by children than the pitch (Xirui, 2017). 

  As Zhao Xiaosheng (Ling & Tian, 2007) mentioned in the article, due to the complex 

skills of piano playing, we put the training of skills in the most important position in piano 

teaching, thus ignoring the topic of rhythm training. In fact, rhythm training is not only 

closely related to the cultivation of students' musical sense but also closely related to the 

training of piano skills. Many piano educators in the 20th century incorporated rhythm 

awareness into their skills training. The representative in this aspect is the female piano 

educator, Abby Wright. Her piano playing and teaching concepts are at the core of rhythm. 

Whether you play vibrato, continuous octave and dual tone, or arpeggios and scales, you will 

deviate from the rhythm of the heart (Ling & Tian, 2007). 

  Pre-teacher’s kindergarten music or early childhood educator is the most rapid 

physical and mental development and the most obvious change period. It is the most 

important period of education and also the beginning of music education, sowing the seeds of 

a good opportunity. Children naturally love music and are willing to accept music education, 

which is good soil for the growth and development of music seeds. Music education should 

start in kindergarten so that children can learn the basics of music at an early age, because 

musical hearing can only be successfully developed from an early age. It can be seen that the 

impression formed in early childhood has an important influence on the development of life, 

and music education should start in early childhood (Xirui, 2017). 

  The teaching of preschool education aims to train the teachers who educate the 

children, and also the enlightened teachers of the children. Piano teaches an essential skill for 

modern kindergarten teachers. Piano teaching ability is of great help to the future employment 

of students majoring in preschool education. For students majoring in preschool education, 

their future work in early childhood education and teaching, so when teaching piano, teachers 

pay more attention to the integration of piano performance and early childhood teaching, 



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requiring students to master and flexibly apply the knowledge they have learned, and they can 

play and sing children's songs themselves in kindergarten teaching. Preschool education 

students do not need to have too high or too difficult performance skills, but from the actual 

situation, pay attention to strengthening the practice skills training, grasping the rhythm of 

training methods and intensity, and becoming more qualified preschool teachers (Dai, 2020). 

  Teachers need to define what elementary students will study and accomplish. 

Elementary students can be of any age, from preschool through senior adults. Regardless of 

age, they all need to learn the same basics, concepts, and skills. Naturally, some students will 

aquire these skills more quickly than others. Students learn to apply concepts and skills by 

doing the following: hearing, reading, playing the piano, writing, and analyzing (Jacobson 

et.al., 2015). 

  Researchers discovered that while teaching piano courses in preschool education 

from 2004 to 2020, students play fast and slow, the rhythm is not stable, and the rhythm is not 

accurate. Through literature review, peer interviews, and the researcher's own teaching 

experience, it is found that "how to solve these rhythm problems in playing?" Not enough 

attention has been paid to teaching, which leads to the frequent occurrence of inaccurate 

rhythm. The small number of books or textbooks specialising in piano rhythm practice is also 

another reason for the development of rhythm practice. This study aims to create piano 

rhythm exercises in the piano learning of preschool education speciality, and to study the 

evaluation results after using piano rhythm exercises. 

 

2. METHODOLOGY  

 2.1 Research setting 
 In this study, the researchers observed that most piano learners in preschool 

education had the problem of the wrong rhythm when they completed the piano playing 

homework through teaching. Through literature review, peer interview, and expert discussion, 

this paper conducts experimental research on the rhythm practice of piano beginners majoring 

in preschool education, designing, researching, and developing methods. The course of 

creating rhythm exercises consisted of a single set of experiments, verifying the consistency 

and effectiveness of the tool, observation, and interviews with trial participants. This study 

included 22 piano students who volunteered and were between the ages of 18 and 20 years in 

average. 

 The researchers reviewed that piano rhythm training has many benefits for preschool 

students learning piano playing well. The references were based on domestic and international 

research. In addition, the concept of the study design and the teaching content were analyzed 

by an expert panel. To help researchers provide suggestions or opinions on the creation of 

exercise manual suggestions, course plans, course duration, examination plans, student 

satisfaction surveys and other aspects, and to conduct validity, so as to provide feasibility and 

effectiveness for the research.  

 The researchers interviewed Tan, an associate professor at Shanxi Taiyuan Normal 

University; Cai, a piano lecturer at Shanxi Taiyuan Jinzhong College; and Xu, a piano lecturer 

at Shanxi Taiyuan University. They all have been teaching piano for more than 15 years and 

invited them to form an expert group. After the results of the expert symposium came out, the 

researchers put forward the following questions worthy of discussion: First, the importance of 

rhythm practice for preschool students learning the piano. Second, rhythm is an important 

obstacle for piano learners in preschool education. 

  2.2 Research tools  
  The research tools were composed of four types: Through studying the teaching 

literature and related papers, the researchers selected 9 rhythm exercises, 9 repertoire 



103 

 

exercises, and 3 tests to construct rhythm exercises. Invite a panel of experts to evaluate the 

validity of the tracks and practice questions. 

 1. Rhythm Practice: Based on the advice of experts, rhythm-based exercises were 

developed for 9 etudes and 6 children's songs, with a mean accuracy of 0.75. 

 2. Lesson Plan: The researchers studied the literature on the problem of rhythm. We 

wrote lesson plan numbers for 12 weeks, 9 weeks of practice and use of music, and 3 weeks 

of exams, and submitted them to a panel of expert’s assessment results for after completing 

the lesson plans with the expert group, the validity value was 0.8.   

 3. Evaluation criteria for designing a rhythm based on rhythm accuracy, expression 

fluency, performance methods, and tonal production a formative test three times and improve 

the students' ability to play the piano with rhythm accuracy, fluency in expression, 

performance methods, and tonal production. 

  2.3 Data collection and analysis 

 The researchers created a rhythm exercise course based on the expert meeting and 

invited a group of experts to evaluate the effectiveness of the course plan. Researchers first by 

researchers found problems in the teaching practice for many years, consulted the related 

literature at home and abroad, and communicated with the teacher interviews, found in 

preschool education major students’ piano learning, common wrong notes, using the wrong 

finger, playing the problem of inaccurate rhythm, and especially the rhythm of playing in the 

most serious mistakes. According to the problems found, the researchers and the expert group 

discussed the main reasons for the rhythm problems in piano playing among the students of 

preschool education majors in our school in the course of piano learning through the network 

teleconference: 

   1. Piano learners in preschool education have a weak enrolment foundation and 

most of them have not been exposed to piano learning before enrolment. 

   2. The piano lessons in pre-school education in our school lack targeted rhythm 

training courses. 

 After consulting relevant literature, researchers developed rhythm practice courses 

and invited experts to put forward suggestions and opinions to evaluate rhythm practice 

courses. Relevant contents included teaching curriculum arrangement, examination courses, 

textbook selection, and the feasibility of a student satisfaction questionnaire. 

  Experiments and practice in the classroom, the researchers used the piano rhythm 

practice course to teach 22 piano students in the experimental group, evaluated the teaching 

results, collected the teaching results data, and analyzed the data.  

 

3. RESULT AND DISCUSSION 

  The course is effective; it consists of 9 weeks of teaching, 3 weeks of examination, 

and concludes with 12 weeks of using 9 etudes and 6 children's songs. In the evaluation 

performance results, the average scores of the 3 tests were 27.45, 28.77, 33.16 respectively 

and the percentage scores were 68.64, 71.93, 82.9 respectively.  Creating the piano rhythm 

exercises is an effective 12- week course, using 9 etudes and 6 children's songs. The results of 

such research are consistent with Donald and David (2011) that rhythm patterns are so 

important in the perception of music that it is sometimes possible to identify a melody from 

just the rhythmic pattern. In addition, Levitin (2006) Xianjun (2019) suggest that the teacher 

trains students to beat and sing different beats with the metronome so that students can really 

feel the beat uniformity and speed stability of the music so that their rhythm perception and 

expression can develop.  

  According to Baoqing (2011), there is pitch and rhythm. There are some forms of 

rhythm, free rhythm, and so on. Like the pulse and breathing of living things, rhythm is the 

embodiment of musical life, and the significance of rhythm training in the process of learning 



104 

 

music is self-evident (Meige & Meiyu, 1990). Therefore, as reported by Ling & Tian (2007) 

and Deyue (2001), many piano educators in the 20th century neglected rhythm awareness in 

their skills training, the complex skills of piano playing, and the training of skills in the most 

important position in piano teaching, thus ignoring the topic of rhythm training. Related to the 

report, as reported by Jacobson et.al. (2015) Lin & Danpradit (2021), rhythm is a natural part 

of the human experience. Humans walk with a regular gait, and the rhythms are naturally 

tapped, clapped, or drummed, many times unconsciously, as a part of daily living. Young 

children respond physically first to the rhythm of the music and later to the pitches.  

 Francesco (2015) pointed that a good sign was the classroom for playing the rhythms. 

They also displayed certain rhythmic traits in the simplest meters; they tended to use just a 

few rhythmic stereotypes and seemed to be under the impression that the rhythmic dimension 

derived indirectly from the choice of pitches, instead of being truly integrated with the 

melodic thinking or playing in the invention. Therefore, Lily & Esther (2008) said, pitch and 

rhythm are important elements in both music and language. Pitch and rhythm discrimination 

are required not only for learning music, but also for language acquisition as children learn 

the nuances of the language in their environment. Pitch-contour processing is an important 

perceptual organizational device for infants, in processing not only musical but also speech 

sequences (Trehub, 2006).  

According to the report, as reported by Ruixue (2011), the most important aspect of 

African rhythm is "beat sense", the first beat of the downbeat. According to this characteristic, 

the students are trained. Specific steps include: 1) rhythm training without stress; 2) rhythm 

practice with regular stress; and 3) irregular stress with regular stress. Cross-rhythm is one of 

the training methods in cross-rhythm. Students can initially feel the charm of African music's 

cross-rhythm (Fan, 2015). However, the number of exercises too high, resulting in the student 

having less practice time or speeding up the practice time too much. Music teachers or anyone 

interested in this innovation to use or develop further should study more deeply or more 

complexly, adjust the content of the exercises accordingly, and possibly change or expand the 

audience of the experiment more. 

 

4. CONCLUSION 

  The creation of the piano rhythm exercises course is effective; it consists of 9 weeks 

of teaching, 3 weeks of examination, and concludes with 12 weeks of using 9 etudes and 6 

children's songs. In the evaluation performance results, the average scores of the 3 tests were 

27.45, 28.77, 33.16 respectively and the percentage scores were 68.64, 71.93, 82.9 

respectively. However, after the test, the students who participated in the activity felt fun, 

were willing to practice, and, of course, had higher skills. All students request a practice file 

for further use. 

 

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Fan, H. (2015). On piano teaching: Shanghai music. Publishing House.  

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