Description
Research on the concept of childhood musicality has shown that musical communication and creativity are important indicators of musicality in children aged 3 to 6 years (Buren et al., 2021). However, established measurement tools for children under 6 years mostly assess auditory abilities only (Hallam, 2006). This study aims to develop a performance test to capture musical communication and creativity in children between the ages of 3 and 6 years. For this purpose, tasks related to idea fluency, improvisation, movement imitation, reflexive interaction, as well as emotional discrimination and production, were assembled.
The tasks were piloted with 50 children from urban daycare centers aged 3 to 6 years (M = 5.17, SD = 0.93 years; 58% female). All tasks were conducted using a djembe or keyboard and required no formal prior knowledge. The assessment was based on defined criteria without expert judgment. To evaluate the suitability of the tasks, item difficulty, variability, and item discrimination, as well as correlations with comparison measures, were considered.
Most of the tasks demonstrated appropriate difficulty and variability starting at the age of four. Only emotional discrimination proved too difficult for children under 6 years old. The interrater reliability ranged between κ = .52 and κ = .85. Due to open instructions, the implementation of the reflexive interaction task did not meet expectations, resulting in low reliability in the planned evaluation. The test score showed positive correlations with general creativity measurements, but not with related self-report measures. A notable association between musical communication tasks and musical creativity tasks was observed.
The results of this study suggest that most of the tasks are suitable for capturing interindividual differences among children aged 4 to 6 years and therefore form a solid basis for measuring musical communication and creativity in children. A simplification of some tasks, an added originality assessment for improvisation, and a revision of the reflexive interaction task are recommended for further optimization.
| Names, affilations and contact information | Katharina Schaaf, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, katharina.schaaf@ae.mpg.de; Verena Buren, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, verena.buren@ae.mpg.de; Franziska Degé, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, franziska.dege@ae.mpg.de; Daniel Müllensiefen, Goldsmiths University of London, d.mullensiefen@gold.ac.uk |
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| Bio | Katharina Schaaf is currently a Master's student in Psychology at the University of Ulm and an incoming PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. She holds a bachelor's degree in Psychology (University of Ulm). Most recently, she served as a tutor for research methods at the University of Ulm. Her research interests include children's aesthetic development, developmental aspects of rhythm and children’s creativity. |