Abstract
Musical abilities and active engagement with music have been shown to be positively associated with many cognitive abilities as well as social skills and academic performance in secondary school students. While there is evidence from intervention studies that musical training can be a cause of these positive relationships, recent findings in the literature have suggested that other factors, such as genetics, family background or personality traits, might also be contributing factors. In addition, there is mounting evidence that self-concepts and beliefs can affect academic performance independently of intellectual ability. Students who believe that intelligence is malleable are more likely to attribute poor academic performances to effort rather than ability, and are more likely to take remedial action to improve their performance. However, it is currently not known whether student's beliefs about the nature of musical talent also influence the development of musical abilities in a similar fashion. Therefore, this study introduces a short self-report measure termed “Musical Self-Theories and Goals,” closely modeled on validated measures for self-theories in academic scenarios. Using this measure the study investigates whether musical self-theories are related to students' musical development as indexed by their concurrent musical activities and their performance on a battery of listening tests. We use data from a cross-sectional sample of 313 secondary school students to construct a network model describing the relationships between self-theories and academic as well as musical outcome measures, while also assessing potential effects of intelligence and the Big Five personality dimensions. Results from the network model indicate that self-theories of intelligence and musicality are closely related. In addition, both kinds of self-theories are connected to the students' academic achievement through the personality dimension conscientiousness and academic effort. Finally, applying the do-calculus method to the network model we estimate that the size of the assumed causal effects between musical self-theories and academic achievement lie between 0.07 and 0.15 standard deviations.
Highlights
This study investigated how musical activities and abilities are related to intelligence, personality, self-concept and self-theories of musicality and intelligence as well as academic performance in a sample of female adolescents
The main result of this study is a network model generated by the application of the PC algorithm to the correlational data
As such the network model replicates some important findings form the existing literature. Among these are the association of intelligence with musical abilities and musical training, which has been found in a number of previous studies (Schellenberg, 2006, 2011; Ruthsatz et al, 2008; Mosing et al, 2014b)
Summary
Musical abilities and engagement with music have been shown to be positively related to cognitive abilities (e.g., Chan et al, 1998; Ho et al, 2003; Schellenberg, 2006, 2011; Ruthsatz et al, 2008; Degé and Schwarzer, 2011) as well as pro-social behavior (Bastian et al, 2000; Harland et al, 2000; Broh, 2002; Kirschner and Tomasello, 2010) and academic performance (Weber et al, 1993; Gardiner et al, 1996) in secondary school students. Among the potentially confounding variables investigated in the past are the socio-economic status (SES) of the parents’ home (Corrigall et al, 2013), genetic endowment (Mosing et al, 2014a), personality factors (Corrigall et al, 2013), and beliefs and concepts about one’s own abilities (Degé et al, 2014) While these confounding variables can be controlled for in studies with randomized controlled designs, thereby assessing the unbiased effect of music interventions on outcomes in other domains, it is interesting to record these confounding variables in observational designs; sometimes, a confounding variable may turn out to be an important mediator of an experimental effect. After controlling for confounding variables, Hille and Schupp (2015) found significant positive effects of musical training (i.e., music lessons on an instrument for a sustained period of time) on school grades and personal academic ambition in their sample of adolescents
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