Classical music education in China: The effectiveness of the WeChat social media platform and its impact on the communicative and cognitive skills of music students

The research purpose is to evaluate the effectiveness of the WeChat social networking platform for music education in China, considering the opportunities for communication and cognitive skills development of music students. The research underlines that the advantages of WeChat in learning are the updated educational information, learning flexibility, information selection to meet the student’s interests, group work, and mobile learning. The development of recommendations for using WeChat in learning to play the piano consisted of a lecture platform with learning materials, automated knowledge testing, analysis of the musical repertoire, and self-learning of materials to acquire additional knowledge. The results revealed that group 1, which learned the program using the WeChat application developed a high level of communicative (82%) and cognitive (78%) skills. Group 2, which did not use modern technologies, had a high level of communication skills among 42% of students and cognitive skills among 31%. The development of communication skills depended on the group work used for the analysis of the repertoire (0.91), associated with the assessment of compositions, interpretation difficulties, and mechanisms of expressive performance. Cognitive skills depended on the self-learning of the topic (0.92) and the choice of the best material as well as the understanding of its key features. The practical research significance is to ensure the introduction of innovation in musical education using the WeChat platform. Future research is needed to determine the effectiveness of musical knowledge as a result of using the WeChat and Youku applications.