This article presents six case studies from England, Australia, and Hong Kong, which illustrate the different ways creativity in music is defined and assessed by teachers and learners in various educational contexts. It considers the influence of educational policies on the assessment of musical creativity. It also examines the key features of music creativity assessment in order to draw parallels between various contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for classroom practice.

Group-based therapeutic songwriting has been applied to enhance the wellbeing of young people. Artist-led songwriting experiences have potential to enhance wellbeing of young people but this has not yet been fully explored. Understanding how this activity impacts wellbeing can advance practice. This study offers a music therapy perspective on artist-led group songwriting, highlighting contextual factors that impacted wellbeing outcomes. A two-day artist-led songwriting program with 85 young people was observed. Video footage, ethnographic field notes and artefacts were thematically analysed and produced themes relating to contextual factors and wellbeing outcomes. Three overarching themes resulted: young people feel safe; young people have fun; young people push beyond boundaries. Contextual factors (sub-themes) included direct and honest feedback, high-energy rituals and emphasis on artistic excellence. Insights into circumstances permitting wellbeing outcomes for young people were obtained. Contextual factors helped shape the songwriting environment by promoting fun, safety and pushing boundaries. This environment enabled young people to engage in the program and benefit from its wellbeing-focused activities. Findings can inform music therapy and other professions using group songwriting with young people to foster wellbeing.

Recent debate within the domain of music education has focussed on issues of discriminating between higher and lower quality learning outcomes. Much of this debate has centred on the language of music education, particularly in giving both substantive and psychometric meaning to terms as diverse as 'the craft of music', 'musical skills', 'originality', 'musically convincing', and 'convincing development of ideas'. Moreover, in the search for standardisation in music assessment, much of what is conventionally described in assessment criteria reduces musical assessment to quantifiable competencies often not indicative of the higher-order musical thinking underlying the production of these competencies. That is, assessment often fails to resolve the dilemma of the 'parts' and the 'whole'. In this paper we propose an assessment framework based upon a synthesis of current text processing theory with Biggs and Collis' (1982) SOLO Taxonomy. We propose that musical assessment should primarily be sensitive to the quality and structure of music thinking. We argue that musical learning, like other domains of learning, can be analysed for evidence of structural quality and coherence, and that such evaluations may provide viable diagnostic as well as summative information about musical outcomes. ur purposes in this paper are broadly twofold: to highlight ambiguities and uncertainties associated with current practices in the assessment of creative arts, with particular reference to assessment processes in music; and to propose a framework for such assessment that may give greater clarity and certainty in describing musical performance and outcomes. It is not our intention at this time to propose an assessment schedule for an examination of music -such a schedule would require much empirical validation. What we do aim to achieve, however, is a theoretically defensible framework through which such a schedule may be developed. We argue that such a framework requires some degree of reconceptualisation of what is focussed on in musical assessment, how such foci may reflect the components and their relationships in describing 'good' musical performance, and how, in taxonomic form, such reconceptualized assessment may reliably indicate both quantitative (competencies) and qualitative (expressive) elements of musical outcomes.We argue that good assessment will achieve three objectives: it will reflect and be informative of the quality of learning/performance outcome, it will reflect and be informative of the processes yielding that outcome, and will reflect and be informative of the cognitive and metacognitive knowledge driving those processes. That is to say, good assessment processes must be descriptive of the quality of learning/ performance and, concomitantly, of those processes and knowledge implicitly indicative of the quality of learning/performance outcome (see Figure 1).

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