The impact of musical improvisation on children’s creative thinking Navarro Ramón, Laura Chacón López, Helena Improvisation Music education Creative thinking Musical creativity This paper reports some findings from a doctoral thesis, which was been pursuing at the University of Granada, Spain. The author would like to thank the staff and children of Conservatory of Santiago de Compostela for welcoming the idea of this project, and specially to Maria Jos´e P´ampano and Alejandro Vargas for their collaboration as experts on the assessment of children musical thinking. This article seeks to be a contribution to the defence of the development of musical creative thinking in educational settings. This research report evaluates the efficacy of a musical improvisation workshop with 8-11-year-olds (N = 17) as aiming to develop children's creative thinking. The study was conducted with two groups of 8-9-year-olds and 10-11-year-old children over a period of three months combining collective and individual lessons. The music lessons were improvisatory activities around an upright piano as the main tool but enriched with a variety of musical instruments, objects, and proposals (musical and extra-musical assignments). Webster's Measure of Creative Thinking in Music - MCTM II (Webster, 1987, 1994) was administered before and after the six-month teaching programmes (i.e., pre-test and post-test) to assess children's creative thinking in terms of four musical factors: extensiveness, flexibility, originality, and syntax. The study demonstrated how creativity was significantly fostered in children through musical improvisation with a considerable increase of the four musical factors in both groups, with the main progress in musical originality (group of 8-9 year old) and musical syntax (group of 10-11 year old). The study also revealed that the difference between agegroups diminished after the intervention and the variability between the participants decreased after an improvisation workshop, especially in group 2 (10-11 years), indicating that because of the training, the initial differences tend to be minimized. However, individual differences highlighted the complexity of analysing the creativity paradigm. 2021-07-06T07:40:37Z 2021-07-06T07:40:37Z 2021-05-11 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Laura Navarro Ramón, Helena Chacón-López, The impact of musical improvisation on children’s creative thinking, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Volume 40, 2021, 100839, ISSN 1871-1871, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100839] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/69533 10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100839 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Elsevier