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THE VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF BENTLEY'S MEASURES OF MUSICAL ABILITIES
Author(s) -
McLEISH JOHN
Publication year - 1968
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1968.tb02007.x
Subject(s) - psychology , test (biology) , audiology , musical , reliability (semiconductor) , anxiety , developmental psychology , statistics , mathematics , art , medicine , psychiatry , paleontology , power (physics) , physics , quantum mechanics , visual arts , biology
S ummary . A group consisting of twenty‐five ESN children, aged from 8 to 15 years, fifty primary school children, aged from 9 to 10 years, and thirty secondary modern children, aged from 12 to 13 years, were tested with Seashore's, Bentley's and Wing's tests of musical ability. The group was re‐tested with Bentley's test exactly a year later. The children's scores on all the tests in the three batteries (six in Seashore, seven in Wing, four in Bentley) were positively correlated. A general factor was extracted, accounting for 35 per cent of the total test variance. This was identified as Burt's ‘group factor of musical ability.’ Bentley's measures show saturation coefficients of 0·646 on the average, in contrast to an average of 0·470 in Wing and 0·621 in Seashore. The test‐retest reliability of Bentley's test (total score) was found to be 0·830. Of the three batteries, Bentley's was found to be easiest to use, causing least test anxiety in the three groups of children and being most economical in time needed for testing. The ESN group was found to be markedly inferior on all three batteries, less so on Bentley's tests than on the two others. However, in tests involving simple auditory discrimination (pitch, intensity) their average scores were equal to the other groups. But in more complex judgments, involving memory, their average scores dropped significantly. As far as the primary school group is concerned, the strong impression was given that not enough ‘headroom' is provided, as the musical quotients (Bentley ‘grades’) were markedly bunched at the top end.