Creativity level of students in the course of collaborative flute jamming

Abstract

The direct impact of jamming on human creative thinking has been little studied. Within the framework of the study, the effect of collaborative playing on the level of creativity of students (for example, playing the flute) has been investigated. The key objective of the research is to determine a correlation between the level of creativity of students and their experience of jamming in groups based on pre- and post-tests. A hypothesis that there is a connection between creative thinking and the process of jamming has been put forward. A total of 260 respondents were divided into control and experimental groups (130 people each). The control group played exclusively classical pieces of music based on musical notation while the experimental group was engaged in collaborative jamming. In the course of the research, the students took a creativity test (developed for the purpose of the study) in the first, second, and third weeks of the experiment. As a result, six datasets were obtained; these were checked for obedience to the normal distribution with the help of the Shapiro-Wilk test and analyzed with the help of the two-sample t-test for independent variables. Based on the results of the 21-day experiment, the experimental group demonstrated much higher levels of creativity in the second and third weeks (the mean scores were 7.82 and 8.74, respectively) compared to the control group (4.62 and 4.64, respectively). The results in the first week were almost identical. Thus, an alternative hypothesis that there is a correlation between an increase in creative thinking and the process of jamming through the example of playing the flute was accepted. Students from the experimental group rated the jamming process extremely positively. In particular, they reported that these practices improve mood and musical skills, and also make it much more effective to learn collaborative play. It is important to note that during the selection of respondents and dividing them into groups, most students wanted to join the experimental group, which indicates an increased interest of students in jamming. The results obtained can be useful in the field of psychology and musicology and serve as an argument for the introduction of jam sessions into the curriculum of higher educational institutions.