Enhancing children’s creative practical ability through emotionally motivated music teaching

We used a quasi-experimental design to examine the potential of a new framework we developed, called emotionally motivated music teaching (EMMT), to cultivate creative engagement in children’s musical abilities through specific musical tasks. The sample comprised 86 fourth-grade students, who completed either a 12-lesson EMMT intervention (experimental group) or a 12-lesson traditional music curriculum (control group). We conducted analyses of variance to assess children’s pretest and posttest scores on the Assessing Children’s Creative Practice Ability in Music Scale, which evaluates multiple dimensions of musical creativity. At posttest the experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group on all five assessed dimensions of musical creativity. These findings provide music educators with evidence-based strategies for fostering creativity through emotionally resonant teaching. Future research could refine the EMMT and observe its effects on students at different grade levels to address the limitations of the current study.