Open Collections

Abstract

In this study, I facilitated and observed five lower mainland classrooms in British Columbia Canada employing an unmeasured intervention to improve writing efficacy in grade four students through musical storytelling strategies. The original intervention I developed and will be describing is an inclusive design for general classroom learning, fusing two Canadian public design approaches – Stanley King’s (Youth Manual Co-Design) and Murray Schafer’s (World Soundscape Project, Composer in the Classroom). Over one thousand writing samples from the five classes in the study were collected and scored by two Inter-Observers using a Likert-scale measurement instrument. Inter-observer agreement for all selected samples from each of the five classes measured 81.4% and higher. A lagged, multiple-probe design was employed to model raw data comprising some eighty-five thousand entries. The five classes showed statistically significant results with a combined mean gain of 3.99 out of 36 with a p-value < 0.001. The lowest quartile average in the five classes also showed statistically significant results with a combined mean gain of 6.51 out of 36 with a p-value of < 0.001.