The process of musical creation was investigated through a series of semistructured interviews with eight professional composers of classical music. For these eight composers, 12.1 years was the average chronological age when they composed their first work. For the majority of composers, the first composition was a song or melody. The composing process frequently involved first discovering a “germinal idea.” A brief sketch of the germinal idea was often recorded, followed by a first draft of the work, elaboration and refinement of the first draft, and then completion of the final draft and copying of the score. Compositional activity seems to occur most frequently in association with feelings of tranquility, security, and relaxation. Suggestions are presented for future research on the act of musical creation.

SUMMARY. The object of the study was to examine the statistical techniques available for the analysis of process-product studies involving non-randomised quasi-experimental designs, and to demonstrate the practical effects of their use on the data from the Teaching Styles study (Bennett, 1976). Of particular concern were the ' unit of analysis ' or aggregation problem, and the differential effects of treatment grouping by cluster and factor methods.The original grouping of teachers into formal, informal and mixed styles was investigated using a latent class model for the 38 binary questionnaire items. Convincing evidence of three overlapping latent classes was found. The comparison of latent classes in terms of pre-test gain scores was examined using a series of variance component models, allowing for correlation of children within the same class. Differences among classes were altered by the probabilistic clustering of the latent class model compared to the original findings, and the significance of the differences was reduced when the correlation among children was allowed for.INTRODUCTION IN the four years since the publication of Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress (subsequently abbreviated to TS) there have been rapid developments in the statistical methods available for the analysis of complex data. While these developments are still in their early stages, it is already clear that they will have an important influence on the analysis of large-scale educational research studies. Two of these developments are particularly important for the analysis of educational data from surveys and observational studies: the development of latent class models for clustering nonhomogeneous populations, and the development of unbalanced variance component (' mixed ') models for nested and cluster sampling structures.The objects of this article are to describe the application of these modelling procedures to the Teaching Styles data, to report the conclusions drawn, and to compare these conclusions with those found in the original analysis. Implications for future research studies are also discussed (for statistical detail see Aitkin et al., 1981). In the re-analysis, two main questions were considered:

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Summary. Differences in teaching styles have conventionally been described in terms of ill‐defined dichotomies. The aim of the present study was to provide a more adequate representation of teaching practices by creating a typology based on the self‐reported strategies of primary school teachers. 1,258 third and fourth year teachers completed a questionnaire, and the resultant information was cluster analysed. Twelve teaching styles were extracted. Although the usual poles of informal and formal styles were apparent, most teachers appeared to adopt intermediate styles, incorporating elements of both informal and formal strategies. Evidence regarding the validity of the clusters is presented.