Enactive and Reflective Thinking During the Compositional Process by Seventh-Grade Korean Students

The purpose of the study was to examine students' enactive and reflective thinking during the compositional process. Subjects were 20 seventh-grade Korean students enrolled in junior high schools in Seoul, Korea. They were asked to compose music and, subsequently, to describe how they composed music on the Compositional Process Questionnaire. The results showed that students tended to think enactively and/or reflectively in the beginning stages of the compositional process; however, when developing musical ideas to expand their composition, most of them tended to think more reflectively than enactively. Also, while enactive thinkers tended to sing, hum, and/or play on their instrument looking for tunes, reflective thinkers tended to make detailed musical-analytical strategies and make their own strategies, such as "composing is like craftsmanship" and "doing a puzzle", employing auditory and visual images for composing. Implications of these findings suggest that students' descriptions of how they compose can give music teachers insight into how their students might think when composing and lead to better instruction in composition.