An Evidence-Informed Method of Understanding Instrumental Music Teacher Beliefs About Motor Skill Learning

Abstract

How instrumental music teachers instruct, model and offer feedback in lessons has significant impact on student learning, performance and autonomy, and more specifically motor skill development. Ensuring the optimal use of these behaviours is therefore essential. Music education researchers have, however, reported various issues with instrumental music teaching, including teaching being didactic and teacher centred, and teachers using instruction, modelling and feedback in ways that may be detrimental to student learning. Researchers, policymakers and professional bodies have subsequently called for the increased investigation and improvement of instrumental music teaching using evidence-informed methods to support the learning, autonomy and health and wellbeing of future musicians. Teachers’ causal beliefs about optimal teaching practice can be a primary barrier to teacher adoption of new teaching knowledge and improved practices, and the identification of teachers’ beliefs could facilitate more effective methods of teaching improvement. This thesis therefore developed and tested an evidence-informed questionnaire, the Beliefs About Teaching Questionnaire (BAT-Q), to identify instrumental teacher self-reported beliefs about the optimal use of instruction, modelling and feedback for student motor skill learning, and to examine whether teacher beliefs align with established best evidence from motor learning literature. Teacher beliefs about the optimal use of these behaviours were identified using the BAT-Q. Although most identified teacher beliefs aligned with evidence-based motor skill learning recommendations, beliefs regarding how frequently instruction and feedback should be offered to students both did and did not align with best evidence. The BAT-Q provides a novel and evidence-informed instrument for identifying valuable information about music teaching to better inform what teaching behaviours may need further investigation or improvement.