Prognosis of sight singing ability of normal school students

Abstract

A report of a three year experimental study with the purpose of evolving a prognostic test of sight singing ability. The test was intended primarily for the differentiation of normal school students according to their ability in sight singing. During the first year test materials were investigated; during the second, a criterion and a test were evolved; and the results were checked during the third year. The criterion consisted of a test of four short songs of from eight to twenty measures, graded from easy to moderately difficult. Factual knowledge about music notation was found to be of small prognostic value. After a year of experimentation an achievement test was constructed consisting of the following exercises: solfa syllables, dictation, lines and spaces, recognition of familiar songs from notation, scales, notes and rests, vocabulary and measures, and key signatures. The dictation test was found very valuable, and correlated with the criterion .79. A table gives the intercorrelations of these tests with 131 normal school students. After a careful statistical treatment of the data, weights were assigned to various test exercises, and the test, after revision, was given the following (third) year to a group of 144 students. According to the conclusions reached by the authors of this investigation, the most effective combination of test exercises for predicting sight singing ability is obtained by using weighted standard scores for dictation, pitch, and tonal memory, resulting in a multiple correlation of .84 with a probable error of .27 sigma in predicting true scores. In actual application only about 5% of the students promoted to advanced singing classes obtained scores lower than grade C on the five point grading system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)