Who stays? Who goes? - Motivational Development and Dropout in Music ...

Many children and adolescents learn a musical instrument with enthusiasm, while others take little pleasure in it and develop little sustainable intrinsic motivation. However, many music students also stop attending music school and put the instrument in the corner for good. The causes of such interindividual differences in motivation can be found in the person himself (e.g. in the structure of interests), in the quality of music lessons or in the support of the social environment.

In this paper we investigate the question to what extent sustainable motivation of music students develops longitudinally and what effects this has on the retention in or the dropout from music school. The theoretical framework of this study is Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2017), which distinguishes qualities of motivation as well as assumes that the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and social relatedness fosters self-determined motivation (e.g., Cheon, Reeve, Lee, & Lee, 2018).

Numerous studies (e.g., Kingsford-Smith & Evans, 2019; MacIntyre et al., 2018) have examined conditions and processes of self-determined motivation and its effects in school-based music education. However, learning an instrument in music schools, like it is practiced in Austria, has rarely been studied. Specifically, studies investigating the development of motivation and considering conditions of teaching and learning an instrument are infrequent (e.g., Evans & Liu, 2019; Wieser & Müller, 2022).

In an empirical study, music students (N=171, as of May 2023) are surveyed about their motivation, supporting teaching conditions, and music-specific parental behavior using a questionnaire. Findings from regression analyses and structural equation analyses of the first survey cohort are presented, which provide information on the extent to which parental behavior, satisfaction of basic needs in music lessons, and perceived teacher characteristics function as predictors of students' motivation respectively the intention to persist in music schools.