The Identification of Musical Responses in Children with Disabilities by Undergraduate Music Education Majors

The purpose of this study was to see if preservice music teachers’ can accurately identify musical responses in children with disabilities using the Sounds of Intent framework. Specifically, the study sought to examine if basic Sounds of Intent training could affect preservice music teachers’ accuracy in identifying: (1) reactive responses, (2) proactive responses, and (3) interactive responses in children with special needs.  Participants for this study (N = 15) were undergraduate music education majors who completed two video evaluations of musical responses in children with disabilities – one as the pretest and the other as the posttest. Overall, following this basic training, participants selected correct musical responses 97% of the time. To account for multiple testing, a Bonferroni correction was applied, resulting in an adjusted alpha level of 0.02. McNemar Tests revealed statistically significant improvements for proactive (c2 (1, 30) = 18.05, p < 0.001) and interactive answers (c2 (1, 30) = 15.06, p < 0.001), indicating that basic Sounds of Intent training might have helped to increase correct answers. There was no significant change for reactive answers (c2 (1, 30) = 4.17, p = 0.03), indicating that basic Sounds of Intent training did not help improve these answers.