Abstract
Secondary school period in Turkey is a period when students begin to develop their talents and make decisions about making career choices. In this period, it is important to describe the musical talents of the students and their musical preferences in terms of making pedagogical decisions. In addition, the differentiation of students' views on the field of musical talent according to gender and school type should also be examined. This research is in the field survey model, which is one of the quantitative research types. In addition, it is in the case study pattern in terms of describing Karasu district of Sakarya province. The participants are the average secondary schools in Sakarya Karasu district. One of these schools is a religious education-based secondary school. As a data collection tool, the Middle School Students' Tendency in Music Field Scale developed by the researchers was used. The reliability coefficient of the scale was determined as .68. Due to the lack of normal distribution in the analysis of the data, the Chi-square test was used to determine the differentiation status of the scale items according to gender and school type. In addition, the differentiation of opinions about hobby, music genre, and musical instruments were analyzed with the same test. As a result of the research, the tendencies of the secondary school students towards the musical talent field were found to be moderate. Music is one of the top hobbies of middle school students. Turkish Pop music is at the top of the list of preferred music genres. A significant difference was found in favor of female students in terms of their time to music and participation in the school choir, according to gender (p<.05). It was observed that they stated that their career goals in the field of musical talent were largely absent, and these views did not differ according to gender (p>0.05). When we look at the trends in the field of music talent, in some fields in the religion-based imam-hatip secondary school; It was observed that the skills of playing an instrument, playing the melody with an instrument and solfeggio were lower than those of normal secondary schools and there was a significant difference (p>0.05). However, it was observed that there was a higher tendency for participation in the school choir in the religion-based secondary school. This situation may be thought to have occurred due to participation in religious music choirs.