The Effects of Failure on Children's Ability to Perform a Musical Test

Susan A. O’Neill · JOHN A. SLOBODA

53 citations0/0 files storedPsychology of Music

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Diverse Music Education Insights Education, Achievement, and Giftedness Neuroscience and Music Perception

Abstract

This study investigated children's affective and behavioural responses during an evaluative musical testing situation. In particular, the study focused on the effects of test-failure on children's musical test-performance. Fifty-one children (aged 6-10) were individually administered a standardised Melodic Direction Test (Trial 1). Then, they were taught to perform a similar experimenter-devised test on which they encountered success (Trial 2) followed by experimenter-induced failure (Trial 3). After both Trial 2 and 3 they were asked to give their self-perceptions of competence and to predict their performance on subsequent tests. Results showed that, following failure, over half the children experienced a deterioration (maladaptive "helpless" behaviour) in their test-performance on a test identical to Trial 2 (Trial 4); the test-performance of the other children either remained the same or improved (adaptive "mastery" behaviour). Additionally, it was found that children who reported low confidence following failure experienced more performance deterioration than children who reported high post-failure confidence. No differences were found in the test-performance of children identified as mastery and helpless on the standardised test (Trial 1); however, helpless children scored higher than mastery children on the success condition (Trial 2). The study demonstrates that children's performance on tests of music cognition is influenced not only by their levels of cognitive skill but also by their affective and behavioural states during testing. Implications for music practitioners are discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

References

1988A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality.1986Motivational processes affecting learning.1984Achievement motivation: Conceptions of ability, subjective experience, task choice, and performance.1988Achievement goals in the classroom: Students' learning strategies and motivation processes.1988Goals: An approach to motivation and achievement.1978An analysis of learned helplessness: Continuous changes in performance, strategy, and achievement cognitions following failure.1978The Development of the Concepts of Effort and Ability, Perception of Academic Attainment, and the Understanding That Difficult Tasks Require More Ability 1980Human Helplessness: Theory and Applications

Cited by

2007Motivation and Engagement in Music and Sport: Testing a Multidimensional Framework in Diverse Performance Settings 2009Participating in Sport and Music Activities in Adolescence: The Role of Activity Participation and Motivational Beliefs During Elementary School 2010Musical identities in transition: Solo-piano students’ accounts of entering the academy 2020Emotion Regulation Processes Can Benefit Self-Regulated Learning in Classical Musicians

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.