Creatividad y aptitudes en alumnos de educación secundaria en los dominios figurativo y musical

Abstract

The work entitled "Creativity and aptitudes of Secondary Education Students in the figurative and musical domains", aims to confirm the existence of a musical creativity construct. To do so, firstly a literature review about the concept of (general) creativity was conducted, studying the most relevant explicative models (Guilford, 1950; Torrance, 1962; Gardner 1983; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995), and taking into account the debate about the generality vs. Specificity of creative abilities (Baer, 1993; Kaufman & Baer, 2005; Plucker & Beghetto, 2004). As our work is focused on musical creativity, a review of the concept of musical aptitudes/abilities as introduced, to better understand what constitute such abilities (i.e. perceptive aspects, memory, psycho-motor aspects and emotional components); and how such abilities develop in life-span, as well as different procedures to measure such skills. Closeer to our topic of study, the chapter 3 show different definitions and research on "musical creativity". In this aspect, it is specially relevant the contributions of Margaret Vaughan, how was a pioneer on the research field. She adapted the the general conception of creativity measure to the specificity of music domain. Also Webster is a relevant contributor to the field, as he offered a definition and a explanatory model in which he based his measure of musical creativity. Other contributions are also analyzed in this chapter related to the development and training of musical creativity. Our empirical work has different objectives. On one hand to study the psychometrical properties of the different measure instruments used. On the other to answer the following questions: - To confirm the existence of the construct of musical creativity - To study the relation between the different domains of creativity - To study the relation between creativity and ability (both intellectual and musical) - To study the effects of gender and academic course on general-figurative creativity and musical creativity. Seventy-fourth Secondary Education students took part in this research (41 were girls and 27 were boys, 4 of the participants did not indicated their gender). To measure general-figurative creativity Torrance Test of Creative Thinking was used (TTCT, Torrance, 1974). Musical creativity was assess using different task from three different test: From the test designed by Vaughan (1973) the task Rhythmical Dialogs and Ritmic Improvisation were used. From the test designed by Webster (1989) the tasks Rain and Spatial Battle were used. From Wang (1985) test the first task was used (we called "Pottery"). In addition two task were designed ad-hoc for this research (Valverde, 2011): Notes-Instrumental Melodies and Poetry-Sung Melody. These task measure the dimensions of Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration, Musical Sintaxis and Melodical Sense. Also a teacher's evaluation of students general creativity was collected thru a questionnaire designed for this study. To measure intellectual ability the IGFr5 (Yuste, 2002) was used; and to measure Musical aptitudes the Seashore test (Seashore, Leweis, & Saetveit, 1992) was used. Regarding our first aim, it was corroborate throught the use of Confirmatory Factor Analysis the existence of a musial creativity construc. It underlies both the specificity of tasks used in this study, and the specificity of task designer (Vaughan, Webster, Wang, Valverde). Therefore, it can be maintain that that creativity is not just domain specific, but also task specific as suggested by Baer (2009). With reference to the relation between the musical creativity task and the figurative creative measure (TTCT), moderate correlations were found with positive sign with Webster's task (Rain and Battle), and with negative sense with Vaughan's Improvisation. Our results agree with Kiehn (2003), who found a weak correlation but statistically significant between musical creativity (measured with Vaughan test) and general-figurative creativity (TTCT). Regarding the relationship between musical creativity and intellectual abilities (measured by the IGF-5r) and musical aptitudes (Sehashore test), inverse patterns of correlations were found depending on creativity task. So that, Vaughan's (1973) tasks correlated significantly with musical aptitudes (Seashore test), but do not show statistical significant correlation with intellectual abilities. Wang' (1985) and Webster's (1994) significantly correlated with some intellectual abilities, but did now show significant correlation with musical aptitudes. Lastly, according to our results, there are not differences on musical creativity depending on gender. This works conclude with some discussions and implications of the results obtained. This research represents a step further in the understanding on how creativity is manifested in students, and about its nature. We think that one of our main contributions is to offer different instruments that allow the identification of creative potential and musical talent, to develop further interventions adequate for those students, creating collaborative context of musical creation (Giglio, 2013).