The purpose of the study was to explore the effects that individual vs. collective structured creative musical problem solving tasks had on students' compositional products. Subjects in a convenience sample of 32 fourth-graders and 32 fifth-graders were randomly assigned to either the individual or collective condition. The 3 treatment sessions were characterized by an open-ended creative problem solving task, which included questions intended to guide subjects through 3 stages of the creative problem solving process: Understanding the Problem, Generating Ideas, and Planning for Action. Subjects participated in the pre- and posttest individually. Three experienced music educators assessed the compositional products in terms of pattern use, cohesiveness, and creativity. The originally intended MANCOVAs could not be carried out because the data did not meet the necessary assumptions. Pretest and posttest scores were explored with individual ANOVAs. The Bonferroni technique was used to adjust the alpha level. The statistical analyses showed that subjects exposed to the individual condition obtained higher scores than subjects exposed to the collective condition on six of the eight explored subtests, but these differences were not significant. The level of interjudge reliability decreased at each of the three measurements of the study: pilot test, pretest, and posttest. The …

Examined in this hermeneutic phenomenological study is a transformation in the researcher's choral music teaching in which students' abilities to construct self emerged organically from interactions, or dialogues, that took place among and between the students, the teacher, and the music being studied. To allow for such interaction to emerge organically and meaningfully, students and teacher both shared in the power needed to construct a classroom environment in which the localized issues of the classroom and the specific contexts of students' lived histories were maintained and encouraged. This process of interaction, based upon dialogue among and between equal agents in the classroom, is described in the study as dialogic interactionism. In order to examine the concept of dialogic interactionism, three constructs upon which dialogic interactionism is based were developed and philosophically analyzed. They include the construction of self through the construction of self-knowledge; the localized reference system of the classroom, and the issue of power. Each construct is considered within the context of extant writings both in general education and music education philosophy. Following the analysis, a theoretical description of the dialogic interactive choral classroom is given as well a description of how such ideas might be realized in practice. …