Poster #74 - Assessment of musical abilities in children - a systematic review

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Studying musical development requires that musical abilities can be measured comprehensively. However, the various test batteries and procedures used in music research differ in their underlying conceptions. This variety of test procedures makes it difficult to compare results between studies. Furthermore, most common tests focus on measuring aural skills (Hallam, 2006) and neglect important facets of child musicality (like musical communication, motivation, or analytical understanding of music; Buren et al., 2021).
The aim of this review is to provide an overview of existing musicality tests and single musical ability tasks for children up to 10 years by recording their frequency of usage in scientific studies and comparing them on psychometric properties and which abilities they measure. We searched the databases Psycinfo, Pubmed, Web of Science, and Scopus and included tests and studies published before 2019 that assessed musicality in children aged 0 to 10 years which were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals in English and German.
The 2291 papers found were assessed for eligibility by two independent coders. 502 papers were selected for closer analysis. Finally, 392 papers were included.
Regarding the use of published tests, our analysis showed that the Primary Measures of Music Audiation (n = 46), the Seashore Test (n = 31), and the Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (n = 21) were the most commonly used. In studies that assessed musical ability using single tasks, n = 88 measured pitch discrimination, n = 67 rhythm ability, and n = 44 melody discrimination. 16 studies assessed emotional understanding in music. Only 10 tasks included an assessment of musical production skills other than singing.
In our sample, singing was the most popular task used to assess music production in children. Preliminary results of the in-depth analysis for singing tasks (n = 82) show that singing skills were most often rated on a scale, while continuous measurement was used less frequently (n = 25) out of which only 5 tasks used computer-aided analysis. While there was a great variety of singing tasks that covered a broad age range (2-10 years), only two tasks were stated to be based on test-theoretical considerations. Furthermore, reports often failed to provide information on reliability and validity. Very few studies report measures of external validity (parent/teacher rating: n = 1, perceptive musical ability tests/tasks: n = 10) and not all reports provided information on task reliability. Reported reliability measures were split-half reliability (n = 5), test-retest reliability (n = 3), Cronbach´s alpha (n = 3), Cohen´s kappa (n = 1), and inter-rater reliability (n = 30).
Our next step will be the in-depth analyses of the remaining tests and tasks. So far, our results reflect a strong focus on aural skills in musical tests and musical ability tasks and indicate that musical communication and emotional understanding are rarely considered. This review provides a starting point for the development of new and innovative test procedures which can capture childhood musicality comprehensively and meet psychometric criteria.

Authors

• Verena Buren, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
  Presenting Author

• Chloe MacGregor

• Daniel Müllensiefen, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Franziska Degé, University of Giessen