Barbara advises I think a bit more about the randomization of the fingering exercises in the first survey. Here goes. . . .
There may be a natural order for the exercises (A-G)--assuming Czerny was presenting these in an order that makes pedagogical sense. The motivation of randomizing is to disperse any influence that fingering one piece would exert on the fingering of another. But why is that important to do? Why not just let this influence exert itself. If such an effect is significant, is it not better to have it be applied in a uniform way? And if it is subtle, wouldn't testing it repeatedly help us detect it. Also, we are not randomizing the order in which A and E are presented. I think showing them in a fixed order might be the way to go. And we just stick A and E (with their coin toss on recommended fingerings) back into the original order.
The other important matter is minimizing the differences between what we did and the stated procedure of Parncutt et al.:
Each pianist received the complete score of the seven pieces. The scores included tempo and dynamic markings, but not fingerings, which had been carefully erased (by whiting out and recopying). The 12 professional pianists and 3 students received the scores after partici- pating in a companion study that involved sight-reading each piece twice. They took the scores home before writing down their preferred fingerings. The other participants received the scores by mail. None of the participants were directly paid for their services; however, the pianists who had participated in the sight-reading study were reimbursed (£25 for pro- fessionals and £5 per hour for students).
Pianists were informed that the pieces were by Czerny, but were not told the title or opus number of the collection. They were asked to write on the score their “preferred fingerings” for the right hand of the first two measures of each piece. In order to avoid ambiguity, they were asked to write a finger number against each and every note. A preferred fingering was defined as “the fingering that you would probably use in performance.” They were asked to disregard any fingerings that they thought or knew that the composer intended for the pieces; retrospectively, we found no reason to believe that any of them were influenced by such knowledge or belief. They were also asked to write brief explanations for their choice of fingerings directly on the scores; the aim of asking for this commentary was primarily to ensure that the pianists had given the matter some thought and were sure of their fingering solutions.
Note they say nothing about the order in which the pieces were presented, and note that there were different procedures followed followed for two groups of participants. I think it safe to assume that the players in the sight-reading experiment were exposed to the pieces in a fixed order, and that all of the participants were delivered a stack of papers in a particular order. At this point, they could solve the problems in any order they chose. But it seems likely that expert pianists, unless they dropped the papers on the floor, would simply work through the pieces in order.
Our electronic survey interface allows subjects to move between the pieces as well by way of
NEXT and
BACK buttons, but I doubt much use of this will be made. Also, we are not asking for piece-by-piece written rationale, as I am not sure how doing so "ensures" anything about how diligent the subjects were. They say nothing about how these "commentaries" were evaluated to vet subjects--not too surprising for researchers starved for data.
Also, we are not going to tell the students who wrote the pieces, so we don't later have to tell them to ignore this fact. Also, we are simply asking them to "Enter the fingerings you would use to perform this music." We do not say anything about probability. To align with Parncutt (and likely with the variability of such things in reality), we should change this to "Enter the fingerings you would probably use to perform this music." This change can be made easily to the MDC JavaScript.
