7.4 Discussion, Limitations, and Future Research

The fifteen-item L-SONG instrument assesses non-graded student learning in the four interrelated listening contexts of self, others, nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine. The four subscales of L-SONG demonstrate acceptable internal reliability ranging from .71 to .91, and each subscale demonstrates predictive validity via statistically significant gain scores in student learning from pre-test to post-test. Moreover, all fifteen items in L-SONG were judged by four listening experts to be appropriate for each subscale. The reliability and predictive and expert validity of L-SONG indicates that the instrument is useful for assessing non-graded self-report student learning about listening in the self, others, nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine contexts.

The novel conceptualization of listening as a multi-sensory experience in the four SONG contexts challenges the conventional academic teaching of listening as primarily listening to other humans. The inclusion of listening to self, nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine in L-SONG is a departure from the normative measures of listening to other humans reported by Fontana, Cohen, and Wolvin.^[1]

The Listening to the SONG of Life course is a broad and magnanimous view of listening. I invite those teaching a listening course at the undergraduate level in higher education to consider incorporating one or more of the new L-SONG contexts (listening to self, nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine) into their courses.

The perspective of listening to the SONG of life is an evolving system of ideas that parallels developments in (for example) positive psychology,^[2] consciousness studies,^[3] Quantum physics,^[4] and the perennial wisdom traditions.^[5] One major challenge is transitioning from the normative perspective of listening to others to the new perspective of listening to the entire SONG of Life, including self, others, nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine. Ideally, instructors will teach students how to listen to the full spectrum of the SONG of life. I hope instructors will consider using L-SONG to assess student learning and incorporate student feedback in the refinement, conceptualization, and measurement of L-SONG.

This study represents the first in a series of studies that are needed to further explore, validate, and refine the L-SONG instrument. Several ideas for future research follow.

Different kinds of validation for L-SONG are needed beyond the expert and pre-test post-test predictive validity employed in the current study. Specifically, known measures could be compared to the subscales of L-SONG to test for concurrent validity. For example, mindfulness^[6] should correlate positively with self-listening while narcissism^[7] should correlate negatively with listening to others.

Future research might also develop different versions of L-SONG to further test the reliability and validity of alternative forms of the instrument. For example, some of the current study’s experts observed that the unit of analysis varies by L-SONG item.^[8] To create better uniformity across items, another version of L-SONG was created to measure listening behavior in everyday life with a revised scale that ranges from “never or almost never” to “many times a day.”^[9] The efficacy of the new behavioral measure of L-SONG awaits future research.

Several limitations of the current study point to additional directions for future research. One limitation is the need for a control or comparison group of students not enrolled in the listening course. The control group of students would complete the pre-test and post-test measures of L-SONG without the benefit of taking the listening course. A comparison could then be conducted between the pre-test and post-test scores of those enrolled in the listening course and those not. One would expect no differences in scores between the two groups at the time of the pre-test and a difference in scores at the time of the post-test such that those in the listening class would score higher than those in the non-listening course. These kinds of controls also assist in ruling out rival hypotheses like history and maturation.^[10]

In addition, the generalizability of the current study could be more robust given the relatively small sample size and the same instructor teaching all five of the listening courses in the same academic unit. As one example of this challenge, the mono-bias of the same instructor confounds the results with the characteristics of the instructor.^[11] Future research could enlist several instructors who teach a course similar to Listening to the SONG of Life to determine if the current findings are generalizable across instructors. It may be that instructors with different philosophical or spiritual perspectives may have different views of listening to the SONG of life that might impact the results. Another issue related to a single instructor teaching all five courses is the possibility of an experimenter expectancy effect.^[12] The instructor may have inadvertently signaled students (verbally and nonverbally) to perform better on the L-SONG post-test. This could partly explain the medium to large effect sizes in the pre-test to post-test gain scores. Multiple instructors using L-SONG could confirm or refute the plausibility of this expectancy effect.

Finally, given a larger sample size, a factor analysis^[13] could explore the relationship between the subscales in L-SONG. Currently, the subscales are conceptualized as four interrelated factors, but empirical research may show otherwise. For example, alternative factor structures include one underlying listening factor or four independent listening factors.