Measuring of aesthetic endowment in the domain of literature

The studies conducted with the VAST (Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test) had shown that: 1. The dependence of this test scores on the amount of aesthetic training is weak; 2. Their correlation with age is low and 3. Persons belonging to different cultures obtain similar scores. These results are concordant with the view that aesthetic judgments are “objective”. An important question is: may these findings be generalized to other artistic domains? To conduct studies to answer this question, instruments for measuring aesthetic endowment in these domains are needed. The present article describes the constructing and approbation of one such an instrument: a test for measuring aesthetic endowment in the domain of literature. The test consists of pairs of fragments (predominantly fragments from poems); in each pair one fragment is aesthetically better. The instructions provide the criteria which the respondents should follow in making choices and giving examples. Then the respondents make their choices, usually without time limitations. Four versions of the test were successively developed; the last, the fourth version, having admissible psychometric characteristics is described; it consists of 17 pairs of fragments, 3 of which were constructed by one of the authors of this article (A.A. Shiropaev) and 14 were taken from manuals on prosody by G.A. Shengeli. In the case of items taken from the manuals, the preference of one fragment in a pair was based upon rules of versification. The approbation of this version was carried out in one of Moscow gymnasiums, the respondents participated were of different age, 77 of them were from the sixth grades, 82 - from the seventh grades, 43 from the ninth grades and 3 were elder persons. The data of the latter were added to the data of the ninth grades. The data of 3 respondents from the sixth or the seventh grade were excluded. The mean scores (the mean numbers of correct answers) standard deviations and measures of reliability (Cronbach's alphas) were calculated for three grades. In all grades the mean scores exceeded the expected in the case of random choices, but the reliability measure reached admissible values only for the eldest grade. These results suggest that the test developed may be used as a measure of aesthetic endowment for persons elder 15 years. Thus, the test differs from VAST which may be administered to younger ages. This is not surprising given that the processing of verbal information is more demanding with respect to cognitive development than processing of visual information.

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