Abstract:

Over 2 million Canadian children take music lessons outside of school, often for a decade or more. Parents invest an extraordinary amount of time and financial resources in supporting those lessons, but even so, many children abandon music-making and rarely play instruments in their adult lives. Prior research has shown that student enjoyment of music learning is strongly correlated with lifelong positive outcomes. The present study was designed to determine what factors predict enjoyment during music lessons, which in turn predicts whether children will make music as adults. The data were comprised of self-report questionnaires completed by students (N=2492), teachers (N=1451), and parents (N=5213), with over 100 closed-ended questions completed by each of the three groups of respondents. In addition to demographic data, student respondents commented on practising habits, after school activities, lessons, and parental involvement. Teacher respondents were asked to describe pedagogical practices and challenges, professional development strategies, use of technology, and ways of interacting with parents and students. Parents reported on ways that they supported their children through practising, goal setting, and modeling musicianship. In the present paper, our analysis focuses primarily on the student data, with parent and teacher data supplementing the student analysis. 14 student composite measures emerged from the analysis, including intrinsic motivation, teacher influence, self-efficacy, planning/practising strategies, and the practice environment.

Of these 14 measures, 66% of the variance for the outcome of student enjoyment was predicted by three measures:
(a) intrinsic motivation,
(b) skill at technical work, and
(c) effective planning/practising strategies.

Over 54% of the variance was explained by intrinsic motivation alone. The intrinsic motivation scale was made up of 9 survey items, including learning music as a form of self-expression, wanting to perform with other musicians, enjoying the challenge of music, and wanting to enjoy music throughout one’s life. The composite measure that included items measuring teacher influence, such as admiration for one’s teacher, support and encouragement from the teacher, setting clear expectations, and modeling musicianship, predicted less than 1% of the variance and only emerged as a predictor in the fifth step of the regression analysis. Parental behaviours also predicted less than 1% of the variance and emerged even later in the regression analysis. That said, over 70% of the teachers reported that their greatest teaching challenge was to motivate students to practice. By examining the three data sets together, it would appear that intrinsic motivation on the part of students is crucial, and as the construct implies, that motivation comes from within. Faced with unmotivated students, teachers attempt to motivate those students but with little effect. Likewise, parents who help their children practice also have little effect in the longer term. The most powerful predictors of musical enjoyment, both during music lessons and across the lifespan, are neither the lessons nor the parental behaviours, but rather the students’ desires to express themselves musically and to persist because they are inspired by hearing others perform and wish to make music throughout their lives. In closing, implications for radically altering lesson strategies and parental support systems are proposed.

Keywords:

Music learning, intrinsic motivation, teacher influence, parental behaviours.