Source:

Zelenak, M. S. (2019). Predicting music achievement from the sources of self-efficacy: An exploratory study. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 222, 63-77.

What did the researcher want to know?

To what extent do various sources of self-efficacy predict music achievement, and how does this relationship vary by ensemble setting, school level, student sex, or years of enrollment in secondary school ensembles?

What did the researcher do?

Zelenak studied 73 band and orchestra students who were auditioning for elite “all-county” ensembles. Self-efficacy was measured via the Music Performance Self-Efficacy Scale (MPSES), which students completed before their auditions. The MPSES, which Zelenak designed and used in two previous research studies, contains 24 items that measure the four sources of self-efficacy:

• Enactive Mastery Experience: previous experiences of success or failure in an activity
• Vicarious Experience: using others’ accomplishments to understand one’s own capabilities
• Verbal/Social Persuasion: others’ expressed opinions of one’s capability
• Physiological/Affective States: degree and quality of arousal brought on by the task

Music achievement was evaluated using judges’ scores of students’ auditions, which consisted of a prepared exercise, scales, and sight-reading.

What did the researcher find?

Analysis revealed enactive mastery experience to have the strongest relationship to overall self-efficacy. However, verbal/social persuasion was the strongest positive predictor of achievement, followed by enactive mastery experience.

In comparing the relationship between self-efficacy and achievement among various groups of students, Zelenak found a modest significant correlation between these factors among string participants but no significant differences by ensemble type (band/strings), school level (high school/middle school), or sex (female/male). Similarly, Zelenak found no correlation between self-efficacy and years of enrollment in instrumental ensembles.

What does this mean for my classroom?

Zelenak’s finding that verbal/social persuasion was more strongly correlated with achievement than was enactive mastery experience suggests that “musicians may use feedback, critiques, and comments received from others to appraise their ability to complete the performance successfully rather than reflecting on past performance experiences” (p. 72). Therefore, music educators should be aware of the power of their feedback to affect students’ musical self-efficacy and future music achievement.

The kinds of feedback we give students also matters. Zelenak references educational psychology literature that suggests teachers “[emphasize] the ways in which students have done well, [provide] students with reasons to believe that they can be successful in the future, [be] specific when telling students how they can improve their classroom performance, and [communicate] that improvement is likely” (p. 72).