Investigation of students' creativity levels and piano performances in piano education

It is an important consideration for students to have a good performance of piano. It is known that piano performance is associated with many situations such as stage anxiety, self-confidence and self-efficiency. The present research aims to examine the factors affecting the overall creativity levels and piano performances of the students of Uludağ University Department of Music Education and to investigate the level of the relationship between general creativity level and piano performance. Since the piano lesson is taught as a compulsory course in music education institutions and especially in the Departments of Music Education, in this study, while the self-efficiency perceptions and piano performances of the students taking piano education were determined by the Piano Performance Self-Efficiency Scale developed by Gün (2014, s. 35) and the effective and reliable Turkish scale of "How Much Creative you are?" by Çoban (1999, s. 228) was used to determine the general creativity levels of the students. The results revealed in the scope of the research have been evaluated in SPSS 21.0 package program and P <0.05 level was considered statistically significant. In the analysis of data, the value of frequency, percentage of arithmetic average and standard deviation were used as descriptive statistics. In evaluating the relationship between the data obtained with the scales and independent variables, since parametric test assumptions were provided, independent sample t test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used. The relationship between creativity level and piano performance self-efficiency was tested with spearman correlation analysis. More than half of the students participated in this study were female and fine arts graduates of high school between the age of 20-22. As a result of this research, it was observed that, the average level of creativity of the students who participated in the survey was low (-7.66 %), the technical level of female students (26.83 %) and the performance level (36.18 %) were higher than the average of male students (23.63 % and 33.07). While there was no significant difference between the high school graduates level and the General Creativity Levels of the students, it was observed that the average technical level scores of the high school students (26.06 %) were higher than the high school graduates (22.41 %). Statistically significant differences were found between the piano playing time of the students and the mean scores of Technical Level and Performance Level. In other words, the students who play the piano for 5 years or more have higher technical level (26.43 % and 22.33 %) and performance level scores (35.64 % and 32.23 %) than the students who play the piano for 4 years or less. In addition, it is concluded that there is a positive but weak relationship between the students' General Ability Levels and Performance Levels mean scores, and as the creativity skills of the students increase, their piano performance levels also increase. As a result, it has been found that the beginning of music education at an early age and the piano performance of general creativity level are two important factors that contribute positively to self-efficiency of piano performance. Keywords: Education, creativity, music education, performance, piano.