7.0 Introduction to Assessing Listening to the SONG of Life

Listening to the SONG of Life ^[1] is a pedagogical framework that conceptualizes listening as a multi-sensory experience in the four SONG contexts of self, others, nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine. Listening-SONG (L-SONG) is a new instrument developed using a pre and post-test design to measure student learning in the four SONG contexts during a listening course. Results demonstrate that all four L-SONG contexts predict positive gains in student learning using statistical tests at the .01 probability level.^[2] Results also show acceptable internal reliability for the four SONG contexts, ranging from .71 to .91.^[3] Finally, all four SONG contexts have a degree of expert validity. As this study represents the first stage in the process of creating a valid and reliable L-SONG instrument, several ideas for future research are outlined, including adding controls, additional validity testing, and creating a standardized behavioral metric.

Assessment Issues

It took twenty-four years before I developed the Listening to the SONG of Life course in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at my home institution. The story of how and why the course was developed is narrated in two autoethnographies.^[4] To assess student learning in the Listening to the SONG of Life course, and to legitimize the continued teaching of the course, qualitative evidence is described in the form of instructor observations and student journals and poems.^[5] Yet to be assessed is quantitative evidence of student learning. The present research fills this need for quantitative evidence of student learning by developing and testing the reliability, and expert and predictive validity, of an instrument called Listening-SONG (L-SONG). Pedagogically, L-SONG is designed to provide feedback to students about their listening competencies in the four SONG contexts as a non-graded, self-report assessment and not as a means of testing students for a grade.^[6]