Abstract

Against the backdrop of national policies supporting the cultivation of rural generalist teachers and the development of aesthetic education, improving music literacy among primary education majors has become a core priority for curriculum reform at normal universities. To tackle prominent challenges, including students' inadequate musical foundations, insufficient class time, and limited practical training opportunities, this study developed a systematic music literacy training framework grounded in the PDCA cycle. This study used a 12-week (24-hour) training program delivered to 30 primary education undergraduates at Chuxiong Normal University, China. A single-group pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental design, along with paired-samples t-tests, was adopted for quantitative data analysis. The empirical results reveal three key findings. First, participants earned a significantly higher average post-test score of 84.20 than their pre-test score of 67.37, indicating a highly statistically significant difference (t = -9.739, p < 0.001). Second, the average overall satisfaction score reached 4.59, placing it in the highest satisfaction tier. Third, participants achieved remarkable progress in core musical capabilities, including music theory, sight-singing, staff notation, and rhythmic perception, and reported strong recognition of the training's content, instructional approaches, scheduling, and learning gains. This research verifies that the PDCA-based music literacy training scheme can substantially improve students' musical proficiency, narrow individual ability gaps, and demonstrate strong operability, practicability, and participant acceptance. It further offers a reproducible, expandable, and optimizable practical framework, along with empirical evidence, for aesthetic education curriculum reform for primary education majors and for cultivating integrated teaching capacities among pre-service primary teachers.

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