Teacher Feedback in Collegiate Instrumental Music Lessons

Teacher feedback is an integral component of helping students understand their current level of achievement and what they can do to improve their performance. This study built on literature in educational psychology by adopting a framework developed by Hattie and Timperley to explore how different types of feedback are used in studio instrumental lessons. For this study, we investigated the use of feedback of highly experienced collegiate instrumental studio music teachers (N = 6) and their students (N = 18). Results indicated that around 83% of all teacher comments were classified as “feed-back” (i.e., reflections on what the student just played), with far fewer focused on “feed-forward” (16%) strategies for improving performance and “feed-up” (<1%) goal setting. Task-level comments on what the student had just done comprised 85% of the feedback, in contrast to process-level (9%) feedback that provides strategies for improving the next performance attempt and self-regulation comments (<1%) that cue the learner to monitor and control their own performance. Discussion of these results include comparisons between classroom and studio teaching practices and ways of refining instrumental teachers’ abilities to provide more targeted and effective feedback to their students.