Assessing Listening to the SONG of Life
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]
- "Listening to the SONG of Life" (capitalized) is the title of a listening course, and it also represents a pedagogical worldview about listening that I depict as "listening to the SONG of life" (lowercase letters). ↵
- For those unfamiliar with statistical probability, a result from a statistical test that is “statistically significant” at the .01 probability level means that the result could only be attributable to chance one time out of one hundred. Or said differently, the researcher is ninety-nine percent confident that the result is statistically significant. Note that a finding can be statistically significant but not practically significant. Interpreting the results is just as important as obtaining statistical significance. ↵
- Typically, internal reliability for a set of items representing some construct must meet the criterion of .60 or greater to be considered reliable or internally consistent. I discuss this further in the results section. ↵
- E. James Baesler, "Listening to the Divine Song Within the Greater Song of Life," Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture 52, no. 2, (Spring 2017): 86-103, and E. James Baesler, "Listening to the SONG of Life: An Autoethnographic Account of Teaching an Undergraduate Listening Course." Listening Education 8, no. (2018): 71-108. See also Chapter Two of this volume. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- For a complete rationale of why I believe L-SONG should be a first-person phenomenological student self-assessment (a non-graded form of student feedback), and why L-SONG should not be used as a form of testing associated with student grading, consult the following sources. For the role of listening in education, see Jane Vella, Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach: The Power of Dialogue in Educating Adults (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002). For issues regarding first-person phenomenological reports as evidence in higher education, see Daniel P. Barbazat and Mirabai Bush, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014). For justifying meditation as a form of contemplative inquiry, see Arthur Zajonc, Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love (Northumberland: Lindisfarne, 2008). For issues related to standardized student testing, motivation, achievement, and grades, see Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999), and Alfie Kohn, Schooling Beyond Measure and Other Unorthodox Essays About Education (New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2015). A thorough discussion of all of these issues is beyond the scope of the present chapter. ↵