What's new in pedagogy research?

Have you or your students ever played a memorized solo better in rehearsal than in performance? That, unfortunately, is a rhetorical question, isn't it? What happens when a performer suddenly loses the thread of the music? Were they distracted by a negative or unrelated thought? Did they suddenly wonder where they were in the music and what came next? Two Australian researchers investigated these questions in a study titled: Performance Degradation Under Pressure in Music: An Examination of Attentional Process. (1)

Previous research in the general area of "choking under pressure" has delineated two main theories. In the "distraction theory," performance degradation happens when the musician's attention shifts to irrelevant thoughts such as fear of forgetting the notes, fear of an upcoming difficult passage or fear of public failure. These irrelevant thoughts reduce the amount of working memory available for the performance. This theory has been supported by research in which very anxious subjects performed worse than less anxious subjects and implies that anxiety reduces working-memory capacity. In contrast, the "explicit monitoring theory" suggests that the pressure of a performance increases self-awareness and focuses more attention on the processes of performance. In this theory, the performer has learned the piece by kinesthetic or muscle memory and suddenly questions where he is in the music or what the next note will be and cannot remember. The researchers call this type of learning "automaticity" or performing outside the working memory. Researchers Gail Huon and Catherine Wan describe the beginning thought processes of learning music as declarative knowledge, and write that it "is necessary at a novice level, but can become an impediment as the skill becomes well learned. Skilled pianists 'automatically' move their fingers over the keyboard. When they try to control their movements consciously, however, they often find that they do not know how to move them and, as a result, 'slips' in a performance occur." (2) This study explored these two theories and their impact on the test subjects.

Seventy-two psychology undergraduate students from the University of New South Wales participated in this study; the students had no previous musical training. Following a pre-training keyboard orientation, the participants were divided into three training groups. The first group served as the "single task" control group and was taught to play a simple song. The second group was given a "dual-task" condition: while they were practicing the song they had been taught, they also listened to Bach's Fugue No. 20 in A Minor, BWV 865 over headphones. The third group was videotaped while they practiced the piece. They were instructed to "pay close attention to what you are doing" (3) and were told that experienced musicians would be reviewing the tapes. After the training sessions, all the students were involved in five post-test performance trials. The participants in each of the three groups were divided into a high-pressure or low-pressure group. Those in the low-pressure condition were not told when the practicing ended and the testing began. The students in the high-pressure group were told that if they improved their accuracy, they would get $5. They were also told they were paired with a student who had already received a good rating, and if they did not perform well, neither student would get paid. All the students were also given the Trait Scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) to measure their predisposition for anxiety, but this produced no significant indicators.

The test results were interesting. Both the control group and the dual-tasking group did significantly worse in the high-pressure testing situation. The video-monitored group, however, played better in the low- and high-pressure testing situations. The researchers' evaluation says:

    According to distraction theory ... there should be no difference
    between high-pressure and low-pressure participants across three
    training conditions: single-task, dual-task, and video-monitoring.
    In contrast, explicit monitoring theory ... would predict that
    while the single-task and dual-task groups should make more errors
    at post-test when under high pressure, the performance of the
    video-monitoring group should not be
   negatively affected by pressure.
   [T]he performance of the video-monitoring
   participants actually
   improved when exposed to high
   pressure... The video-monitoring
   training was deliberately
   designed to raise the participants'
   self-consciousness during
   practice. Participants appeared to
   have been inoculated against
   performance degradation under
   pressure by the condition of their
   training. (4)

Reflections

The video-monitored group of students was encouraged to consciously monitor their practice and told that the tapes of their work would be viewed by experienced professionals. The researchers reasoned that their performances improved under pressure because they were used to using "working memory" as they played, rather than relying on their automated physical responses. When I first ask my students to memorize a piece of music, we discuss the various types of memorization: kinesthetic (muscle memory), visual, aural and intellectual. I would guess that the video-monitored group in this study relied more heavily on the visual and intellectual modes, because these approaches have, over the years, seemed to help my students the most. This study was particularly interesting in the significant results that the videotaping and accompanying instructions produced with students who were learning and memorizing at the same time. It would be interesting to try this approach with students who have a history of memory slips in performance situations. It also raises the question, "When is the best time for the student to begin consciously memorizing the music?" If the student, particularly at the elementary or intermediate level, waits to begin memorizing a piece until after he or she is playing it fluently, it is probably already mostly in the kinesthetic memory, and the student may not make the additional effort to visually and intellectually commit it to memory.

NOTES

(1.) Huon, Gail, and Wan, Catherine. "Performance Degradation Under Pressure in Music: An Examination of Attentional Process." Pyschology of Music, 33(2), 2005: 155-172.

(2.) Ibid., 157.

(3.) Ibid., 161.

(4.) Ibid., 167-8.

Rebecca Grooms Johnson is the director of keyboard pedagogy at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. She is an experienced independent piano teacher and a past president of the Ohio MTA. Johnson holds a Ph.D. degree in piano pedagogy.