How Does Music Influence Motivation?

While music is an experience that many people would claim to enjoy, not all of them would be motivated to study music or pursue a related career. Every person has specific extrinsic and intrinsic motivators that may or may not be strong and continuous enough to transform the state of enjoying music to studying it as an elective or partaking in its industry someday. To understand learning motivation, Eccles and her peers (1993) created two theoretical achievement frameworks on motivation and parental predictors of adolescent achievement-based behaviors (as cited in Simpkins, Fredricks, & Eccles, 2012, p. 1019). From their study, they developed the Eccles’ expectancy-value model which states that: (1) the belief of parents about a certain domain

Simpkins, Vest, Dawes, and Neuman (2010) studied the association between parents’ behaviors and children’s motivational beliefs in sports and music (i.e. self-concept of their abilities and values). They used data from a longitudinal study involving 589 families wherein parents self-reported their provision of related materials, modeling, encouragement, and parent-child activities from the 1st to 6th grade, and children answered questionnaires on their self-concepts of sports and music abilities from the 1st through 12th grade. Findings showed that mothers’ behaviors at the 1st grade had a positive predictive impact on children’s sport beliefs at 1st grade and the change in the latter’s music beliefs from the 1st to 6th grade (Simpkins et al. 2010). Furthermore, when fathers’ behaviors changed, they positively predicted variations in students’ motivational beliefs from the 1st to 6th grade (Simpkins et al. 2010). Moreover, even when some parent’s behaviors and children’s motivational beliefs differed in gender, only two of 36 relations were dissimilar across girls and boys (Simpkins et al. 2010). The article is important in providing evidence that parents can have distinct impacts on children’s motivation and self-concepts in music and other abilities. However, the results cannot be generalized as parents were mostly middle-class European Americans and so conclusions may not be relevant for children in other ethnic and income groups. Likewise, the study lacked a deeper exploration of the quality of parent-child relationships through investigating details about their common