| Summary: | ABSTRACT
The purposes of this study were: 1) To compare the relationship between the degrees of creativity shown in musical compositions of third grade students (N=163) when they were exposed to either a visual or verbal stimulus, and 2) to examine inter-judge reliability for creativity ratings using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) with instrumental group compositions. Throughout a nine-week teaching unit, all subjects participated in regular music classes where they learned compositional techniques and concepts. They worked in small cooperative learning groups of 3 to 6 students throughout the unit to compose several mini compositions and two large-scale compositions. For the last composition, four classes received a verbal stimulus and the other four received a visual artwork stimulus. Performances of these 34 compositions were videotaped and judged on 13 dimensions by three elementary music teachers using the CAT.
Even though both stimuli were successful compositional motivators for their respective groups, the subtle differences in stimuli types over a short period of time as in this study were not influential enough to affect the creativity scores of student compositions. No significant differences were found between the two groups for any of the dimensions. Reliability scores were calculated, and ranged from .48 to .83 with coefficients on 11 of the 13 dimensions resulting in significant (p<.05) agreements among the three judges. This assessment technique was found to be successful when used with small group instrumental music compositions of third grade students.
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