The effects of music and play activities on the creativity levels of students with mild intellectual disabilities

This study examines the effects of music and play activities on the creativity levels of students with mild intellectual disabilities. A pretest-posttest control group experimental model was used in the study. The study group consisted of 30 students with mild intellectual disabilities attending special education classes in six middle schools in the Alaşehir district of Manisa province. There were 15 students in the experimental group and 15 students in the control group, and the research consisted of a 12-week experimental process. In the first week of the 12-week experimental process, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, Form A, was administered to students with mild intellectual disabilities in the experimental and control groups. Subsequently, Music and Play activities were implemented for the students in the experimental group by the researcher for 10 weeks, one lesson hour per week, while no intervention was made in the control group. In the 12th week, the final week of the experiment, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, Form B, was administered to students with mild intellectual disabilities in both the experimental and control groups. Research data were collected and evaluated using the SPSS 16.0 software package. In the pre-test/post-test comparison of the experimental group, significant differences were observed in the dimensions of Figurative Fluency, Originality, Enrichment, Colorfulness of Imagination, and Figurative Total. In the post-test comparison between the experimental and control groups, the experimental group showed higher average values in many dimensions descriptively, but the Mann Whitney U test revealed a significant difference in favor of the experimental group only in the Figure Fluency dimension. Keywords: Music, play, creativity, mild intellectual disability