The overall purpose of this article is to provide a convenient summary of empirical research on improvisation in general music education and thereby provide guidance to researchers and practitioners, using a systematic, narrative-review approach. By analysing 20 music education research articles, published from 2000–2015 in peer-reviewed journals, we firstly provide an overview of the key features and knowledge of existing research. Secondly we identify how improvisation has been characterized, conceptually before, thirdly, describing the implications of the literature for improvisation in practice. Our article reveals that improvisation tends to be an overlooked activity both in music education contexts and in music education research. Broadly speaking, music education research tends to characterise improvisation within two conceptual frameworks, which have different implications for implementation; ‘structured’, teacher-directed improvisation and ‘free’, child-directed improvisation. We conclude by arguing that music educational research on improvisation is an underdeveloped field and outline a number of questions to be addressed in future research.

中文翻译：

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普通音乐教育中的即兴创作——文献综述

本文的总体目的是对普通音乐教育中即兴创作的实证研究提供一个方便的总结，从而为研究人员和从业者提供指导，采用系统的叙事审查方法。通过分析 2000 年至 2015 年在同行评审期刊上发表的 20 篇音乐教育研究文章，我们首先概述了现有研究的关键特征和知识。其次，我们确定了即兴创作在概念上的特征，第三，描述了文献对实践中的即兴创作的影响。我们的文章揭示了即兴创作在音乐教育背景和音乐教育研究中往往是一个被忽视的活动。从广义上讲，音乐教育研究倾向于在两个概念框架内描述即兴创作，对实施有不同的影响；“结构化”，教师指导的即兴表演和“自由”，儿童指导的即兴表演。最后，我们认为关于即兴创作的音乐教育研究是一个不发达的领域，并概述了未来研究中需要解决的一些问题。