Students’ motivation to study music: The Brazilian context

Abstract

This article presents the results of the Brazilian component of an international research project entitled ‘Meanings of music for students in school-based and non-school musical activities’ across eight countries. This research aimed to investigate the importance and the meaning assigned by students to musical activities developed in school and non-school contexts. The method consisted of a survey, involving 21,975 students from eight countries (Brazil, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and the USA), which was based on the Eccles and Wigfield’s expectancy-value model for motivation. The Brazilian sample consisted of 1848 students from the 6th grade of fundamental education to the 3rd grade of high school, from 11 cities of the Rio Grande do Sul state. These students belonged to three different cohorts of music learning. Those who had: (a) music in schools and as an extra-school activity; (b) music as a school subject; (iii) music as an outside school activity. Data collection was carried out through a 38-item questionnaire about the students’ profile and their opinions on interest, importance, difficulty, utility, competence and confidence in relation to arts, science, physical education (PE), mathematics, Portuguese, and music. Data were examined using mixed-design Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs). Results show that the degree of interest, importance and utility of music increased as the students progressed through schooling, which contradicts data generated from this study in most of the other countries. Despite the interest of Brazilian students in music, arts and PE, they considered Portuguese, mathematics and science to be more important and useful. When compared to other countries, the results show that Brazilian students demonstrated a great value for music, despite the differences in the learning contexts of the three groups. Those students who only studied music in schools showed the lowest levels of interest, importance and utility.