THE EFFECTS OF FOUR CONDITIONS OF 'SAME' AND 'DIFFERENT' INSTRUCTION ON THE DEVELOPMENTAL MUSIC APTITUDES OF KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN RECEIVING TONAL PATTERN TRAINING

The purpose of the study was to describe the nature of developmental music aptitude in terms of the child's use and understanding of the terms "same" and "different." The problems of the study were (I) to determine the comparative effects of four "same" and "different" instruction conditions: hearing the teacher perform and label pairs of tonal patterns as being (1) the same, (2) different, (3) same and different, and (4) a control condition, without teacher performance and labeling of pairs of patterns, on the tonal developmental aptitudes of kindergarten children with high and low levels of pre-instructional tonal aptitudes, and (II) to determine the effect of all instruction conditions combined on the tonal and rhythm developmental aptitudes of kindergarten children, after eight weeks of tonal pattern echo singing instruction.;It was concluded that (1) neither correct identification of sameness nor correct identification of difference is modified by instruction designed to clarify the meaning of the terms "same" and "different," (2) the fluctuation of both tonal and rhythm developmental aptitudes is associated more with the correct identification of difference than with the correct identification of sameness, and (3) the young child's correct identification of difference in developmental music aptitude is improved by tonal pattern training.;The Tonal and Rhythm subtests of the Primary Measures of Music Audiation were administered to four classes of kindergarten children before and after instruction. For statistical analyses, Tonal-Total and Rhythm-Total scores were separated according to the correct option response of the items into Tonal-Same, Tonal-Different, Rhythm-Same, and Rhythm-Different scores. Treatments-by-levels analyses of variance of Tonal-Total, Tonal-Same, and Tonal-Different post-test scores revealed no significant treatment or interaction effects. Significant aptitude effects were found for Tonal-Total and Tonal-Same scores. Correlated sample t-tests of the difference between pre-test and post-test Tonal and Rhythm Total, Same, and Different scores revealed significant gains for Tonal-Total and Tonal-Different scores. Correlation coefficients for each of the six measures revealed that Total and Same scores are more stable than are Different scores.