A research on the development of rhythmic reading skill scale for primary school music lessons

Rhythmic reading is one of the important components of musical reading. Since the accuracy of rhythmic reading will affect the success of expression and interpretation of note times, effective measurement of this concept is beneficial in terms of music education. In the study, it was aimed to develop a scale to measure this skill in 7th grades of primary education. The prepared 25-question test was designed as 3 multiple-choice; students matched the answers to 17 questions by listening to the audio choices; They read and matched all 8 cognitive questions. Each correct was accepted as 1 point, blank and wrong as 0 points. While creating the item pool, in line with the curriculum; elements such as "1-e-and-a" rhythm syllable coding, traditional rhythm syllable coding, additive metered (palsied) rhythms, long use of voiced and silent periods as notes, regular and irregular patterns were used. Expert opinion was used for content validity. The research was conducted with a total of 468 students, 65 of which were pre-test participant and 403 main-test participant. The overall percent success of the test was calculated as 58.7 percent. In the construct validity studies for the scale, a multidimensional structure observed. Since the scale is multidimensional, in the reliability analysis; McDonald's ordinal Omega value was checked and 0.6998 was calculated. The reliability of each dimension was also studied according to the Mislevy and Bock (1990) method and the values ​​were calculated over 0.7. The study allows the rhythmic reading skills of primary education 7th grade students to be measured in less than 1 lesson hour.