Parting Ways With Piano Lessons: Comparing Motivation Between Continuing and Dropout Piano Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Piano teachers believe that dropping out of piano lessons before reaching a moderate mastery of the instrument is a common problem among students. We used self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) to measure the motivation of dropout students and to discover if amotivation and controlled motivation are related to attrition from private piano lessons. Using the Survey of Musical Interests, 55 former piano students who had quit lessons completed a questionnaire with Likert scale, multiple choice, and open-ended questions, and their parents filled out a complementary questionnaire. The dropout students took lessons for approximately 5 years and stopped lessons in the preteen years, which supports a common experience of studio teachers. These participants were compared to 260 students who were still involved with piano lessons. Beyond the predicted findings that dropout students would demonstrate less autonomous motivation and stronger amotivation, other interesting, exploratory findings arose. There were significant differences between the two groups’ types of motivation, and also differences regarding the age at which lessons began, ethnicity, practice amounts, parental involvement, and rewards for achievement. Recommendations are made for future research and for student retention strategies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".