8.1 Exploring Future Academic Research and Scholarship

Chapter Seven describes creating and testing the Listening-SONG (L-SONG) measure for assessing student learning in the Listening in the SONG of Life course. I summarize the ideas for future research on L-SONG here. Future research should add concurrent validation, test the validity and reliability of an alternate behavioral form of L-SONG, retest L-SONG using a comparison (control) group to rule out confounding variables, use multiple instructors to increase generalizability and rule out demand characteristics, and collect additional data for factor analyses to determine the dimensional structure of the scale. These ideas for future research represent traditional social scientific research in listening to the SONG of life.

Additional ideas for future academic research using L-SONG include obtaining feedback on student listening competency from an outside observer.^[1] The outside observer evaluates the student by completing the L-SONG instrument based on their observations and personal knowledge of the student. This provides the student with additional feedback on their listening competencies across the four listening to the SONG of life contexts. To determine the degree of correspondence, the outside observer’s L-SONG ratings could be statistically correlated with the student’s L-SONG ratings.

Another study might correlate specific contexts of listening to the SONG of life with existing measures of listening like the Listening Styles Profile and the Echo Listening Profile to further assess the predictive validity of L-SONG.^[2] Finally, the types of listening skills associated with each context of the SONG of life could be systematically mapped into “. . . process components, descriptors, and listening behaviors . . .” and then organized into skill levels as exemplified in Thompson, Leintz, Nevers, and Witkowski’s listening criteria matrix in their Integrative Listening Model.^[3]