Encouraging and assessing preschool children’s musical creativity

ABSTRACT

Although recognising multiple creativities as an interdisciplinary and contemporary approach to creativity represents the basic opportunity for future change, the assessment of children’s musical creativity is a problematic and insufficiently explored area. The paper discusses the problem of encouraging and assessing the creative musical potential of preschool children using the adopted Measures of Creativity in Sound and Music – MCSM. Considering the inappropriateness of assessing children’s creative musical potential with numerical indicators, the research was focused on the method of participatory observation of fluency and imagination in making sounds and music. The research included 25 children aged 5–6 years in a preschool setting within an ethnographic practice-based methodology. The reactions of children to activities were varied but each child reacted to some of the conducted activities. In addition to the confirmed giftedness of one girl, the musical potential and musical giftedness of one boy were discovered, which was further confirmed by the state of flow during the activities. It was concluded that well-designed and stimulating musical activities can encourage children’s musical creativity and contribute to the recognition of their musical potential and giftedness.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment of creative musical potential
• musical giftedness
• preschool children
• music creativity test

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the teachers and colleagues for their participation in this research.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any potential conflict of interest.