H O

M E

Bachelor students of the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague (KC) are required in their first three years of study to be in a tutor program. The main goal of the program is to help the student develop their ability to be effective reflective learners. A workshop was designed and carried out to collect ideas from the tutors (who were all teachers at the KC) about what can help this process, and how we can develop a practical reflective tool – in the form of a journal.

In the workshop, an example of an effective journal was presented: a form of (analogue) journaling based on the ‘Bullet Journal’ by Ryder Carroll.

https://bulletjournal.com/pages/learn

The teachers were asked to discuss and formulate ideas on how we could use and adapt some of the ideas from the bullet journal for music students, and what the content should be. The main questions were:

• How should the journal function?
• How do we get students to use it?
• What kinds of things are worth tracking and collecting?
• What tools can we come up with for reflecting?

Pilot Study

Formulating and applying a prototype of the Musician's Reflective Journal 

A prototype of a Musician's Reflective Journal was designed based on principles of Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal and including aspects that were collected in the tutor workshop and student brainstorming. A group of 11 bachelor students at the Royal Conservatoire were instructed how to use the journal and asked to use it for three months from the beginning of December 2019 until the end of February 2020. 

A pre-intervention questionnaire was filled out by each student, asking questions about how they reflect on their process, how often they journal, what kinds of things they normally document and how much they enjoy the process of journaling. Additionally they were asked questions concerning their confidence, motivation, self-efficacy, organisation skills, goal setting, strategy and enjoyment in practice and performance.

Each participant was given a journal and a list of instructions. There was no monitoring during this period.

At the end of three months, each participant was interviewed with questions designed to find out how and to what extent they actually used the journal, how they found the experience, what effect it had on their learning and organisation as well as how much they enjoyed journaling compared to before the intervention. They were also asked what would encourage them to journal more or better. The original idea of an exit survey asking the same questions as the pre-intervention questionnaire was abandoned as the answers had more to do with the onset of the corona pandemic than anything else.

The intention of the study was to find out if journaling is a usual habit, difficult, enjoyable, perceived as useful, and whether it had any effects on their learning process, as well as collecting insights from the students about what could help them develop their journaling habits.

The purpose of this research was to determine the self-regulatory needs of students in a conservatoire and design tools that could help them to become more organised and autonomous learners. Some preliminary interventions and a pilot study were made with staff and students of a major European Conservatoire that led to a survey of students’ self regulation habits and the design, production and dissemination of a reflective journal for musicians.

Preliminary Interventions 

Workshop with tutors at the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague

Results 

The tutor group came up with the following insights & ideas:

1. General thoughts & observations 

Too much logging & thinking can be felt by some to destroy the ‘magic’ of their process and lead to over analysis. Point out the difference between analysing, judging and over-controlling and making useful observations, insights and connections. It is important that a journal is customisable for each individual, well structured, yet with possibilities for creativity and easy to use. We would need to instruct students on how to use and customise the journal – they need to feel like it is their own and relevant to them. We need to collect tools and strategies that we can use and adpats to the needs of each student.

2. What’s worth collecting & tracking?

• Lessons and group lessons
• Practice
• Performances
• Goals
• Repertoire
• Achievements
• Obstacles
• Inspiration moments & input
• Health and wellbeing (e.g. sleep, sport)
• Competitions

Reflecting tools

• Ask questions about what you’ve logged
• Look for connections
• It is important to focus on goals rather than on ‘problems’ of perfection

Brainstorming session with 1st-3rd year bachelor students 

A group of 14 students from years 1, 2 and 3 were asked what they thought would be worth collecting, tracking and documenting from their learning process. Their suggestions included: goals, achievements, ‘what impacts me’, ‘what motivates me’, repertoire, feedback, lesson log, practice strategies and methods, observations about performances and tracking engagement levels and what influences it.

Results

Pre-intervention questionnaire

The answers in the pre-intervention questionnaire reflected the student’s self-efficacy, confidence, organisation as well as self-regulation habits. Five of the eleven students worried a lot about not having enough time for everything. Two reported that they were not confident that they would achieve their study goals. Almost all had clear goals and intentions. Half of the group thought they had a lot of methods and strategies for practicing and seven had a high degree of trust in their methods and strategies. Four participants expressed worry about their ability to succeed as a musician and seven had a clear idea about the musician they want to be. Most of the group (9) had trust in the guidance of their teacher and 4 had high trust in their own ability to steer their development, 6 had a medium score in this category and one gave a low score. Seven of the students scored highly for enjoyment of practicing and all reported high enjoyment of performing.

Seven of the eleven participants already documented things either in a journal, on pieces of paper or on their computer and did so at least once a week. Four did not document anything. When asked if they enjoyed journaling, no one gave more than a 6,5 (on a scale from 0-9). 

Post intervention interview

Each participant was asked the following questions: How much did you enjoy the journaling? What did the journaling exercise bring you? What would help you to make documenting and reflecting your process a habit?

Two participants did not take part in the exit interview due to disorientation because of the corona lockdown. Six of the participants reported enjoying journaling more than previously – some mentioning that because of corona, it was more important than ever. 

Benefits that were reported included: a more focussed start to the day, more conscious of their own thinking processes, being able to remember things better and having more clarity, having a better overview of their schedule, better structure, organisation and order and able to be more systematic and more prepared for classes.

When asked what could help to make their documenting and reflection process a habit, six of the participants indicated that they were already in the habit. Suggestions included sharing results and insights with other students, practicing a relaxation technique beforehand, and simplifying how much one has to write.

Analysis and Conclusions

The pilot study involved only a small group of students and therefore was not analysed statistically. The outcomes of the study showed, however, that a survey of a larger group could bring substantial insights into the self-regulatory habits of conservatoire students as well as possible correlations between self-regulation and confidence, self-efficacy and motivation. The positive feedback from those who tried out the journal showed that offering a reflective journal designed for musicians could be beneficial to many students. As a result of the pilot study a larger survey was conducted at the conservatoire and a musician’s journal was produced and disseminated amongst the students.

SRL in the Conservatoire 

Student Survey

Analysis 

Descriptive exploration

All analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 25. The exploration of variables included an inspection for noteworthy differences in instrument groups, departments, and study years (and these differences are discussed if deemed necessary/relevant/interesting).

Data reduction on overall indications of self-regulation

For the sake of data reduction, a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and reliability checks were conducted on 11 initial questions regarding students’ general beliefs on their self-regulation. Excluding both questions on worries resulted in an increase in reliability to Krohnbach’s α = .78 (initial α = .59). The remaining items were inserted in a PCA, where a three factor model appeared to be most feasible, with a total VAF = 56.45 and communalities of .44 and higher. Oblimin Rotation was used as it would allow expected relations between the different components of self-regulation beliefs. The three resulting factors (see table 1) were recomputed into three new variables and interpreted to be an indication of Strategies, Goals, and Self-Confidence. Significant results on Kolmogorov-Shmirnov tests indicated that these new scales did not meet the assumption of normality.

Content: what do they write down and what do they think they should write down

Figure 3 shows the percentages of specific content that students document. Not all of these are necessarily more important than others, but the two largest factors are not necessarily beneficial for self-regulating, as they can be argued to be a standard part of conservatoire tuition. It is interesting to compare figure 3 with figure 4. In this figure 4, students report how important they regard documentation of these different kinds of content.  

It’s especially interesting to combine these questions: those who don’t write down specific content, do they also think it is unimportant? Figure 5 shows that for most of these aspects, students who don’t keep track on this thing, actually admit it to be important or even very important to do so. 

Students' self-regulation habits

The first research question asked: What are the self-regulation issues that face conservatoire students and what are their self-regulation habits?

In October 2020, an online survey was designed and distributed to the student population of the Royal Conservatoire on a voluntary basis. 116 students filled it out using Microsoft Forms.  The questions were similar to those of the pilot study and were meant to get information about students’ self-regulation habits as well as their general motivation, confidence, self-efficacy and autonomy. 

After a brief section on the used analyses, the results of this survey serve to investigate issues as well as habits, and explore the potential of documentation for conservatoire students. This consists of two parts: The descriptive exploration describes different aspects of students’ overall indications of self-regulation and reported documenting behaviors as they are. Then, a final section investigates a possible relation between reported documenting behaviors and students’ perceived self-regulation. The hypothesis for that last second section is that students who document their learning process on a solid basis score higher on self-regulation beliefs than students who do not document as regularly.

Results 

The survey was completed by 116 students (64 female) from all different years, departments, and instrument groups. An overview of the sample can be found in Tables 2 to 4. Results should be interpreted with caution for some groups: regarding instruments, the percussion and plucked strings groups are relatively small, as well as the exam years, Bachelor 4 and Master 2. This disclaimer is especially important for the group of ‘other departments’ consisting of five students from departments as Art of Sound and Conducting. Although all other departments are generally large enough to draw some conclusions, it is good to be aware that about half of the respondents came from the classical department.

Table 5 shows how often students report to document their process. The largest group is around once a week, and around 41% documents on an even more regular basis, whereas 31 percent does it less than weekly. 

Comparing those who document with those who don’t 

To test the hypothesized difference in self-regulation between different levels of documenting, a new variable was computed on documenting behavior. A selection was made on students who reported to document by writing down, keep track of more than two aspects, and at least around once a week. The resulting group of 51 students (44%) is seen as ‘documenting’ students, compared to 65 students who did not meet all of these criteria. 

As predicted in the hypothesis and shown in Figure 6, Mann-Whitney tests indicated that students who document on this regular basis tend to score higher on indications of self-regulation. This was significant for students’ rating on Strategies (U = 1069, W = 3214, p < .001, one-sided) and Goals (U = 1356, W = 3501, p < .05), but not for the difference in reports of Self-Confidence (U = 1464, W = 3609,  p = .14). 

Figure 6. Differences in reported self-regulation between more- and less-documenting students. *Differences in Strategies and Goals were statistically significant.

On the basis of these results it was interesting to compare these documenting students with the others on specifically one question, that was part of the factor called Strategies: “I am good at organisation and time management.” As expected, this difference was significant as well (U = 1184, W = 3329, p < .01). 

If you journal/document, how much do you enjoy doing it?

Responses to the final question “If you journal / document things, how much do you enjoy doing it?” were relatively high on average for documenting students (M = 5,24), and almost a full scale-point higher than the other students (M = 4.26). Again, this difference was significant (U = 953, W = 3098, p < .001). Not surprisingly, a significant correlation was found between how much they enjoy documenting, and how often they do it (ρ = .52, p < 0.001). 

Descriptive exploration

Students’ Overall indication of Self-regulation

As explained in the Analysis section, three variables of reported self-regulation were taken as averages of the questions that seemed to group together, indicating Strategies (Med = 5.0), Goals (Med = 4.33) and Self-confidence (Med = 5.38). As the original questions were answered on a 7-point scale, these indications are moderate to relatively high. On inspection, no actual differences on these variables were found between departments and instrument groups. However, there was also no difference between the study years. This may me because of a ceiling effect: students who score high cannot improve that much. (It could however also be the case that less experienced students would for example think high of their own self-regulation because they do not have a full idea of what it means.)

As noted earlier, the questions on worry were taken out of these self-regulation indications for statistical reasons. However, it is important to have a description of worry among students. As stated in table 1, students report moderate levels of worry over their short and long term ability to be successful, with no clear differences between year, instrument and department. In another way: 53% of students reports to worry about not having enough time and 63% worries about their ability to succeed as a musician.

Students’ documenting behavior

When students were asked how they reflect on and document their studies, they could mark multiple options. The division of responses can be seen in figure 1. No-one said ‘not at all’, and ‘In my head’ is understandibly the most chosen option (more concerning are the 18% of students who did not mark that they think about process). Important for this study, are the answers on ‘I write things down’: it is the answer that fits the definition of documentation as used in this study. 

Figure 4. Perceived importance of documenting aspects, percentages of all students. 

Discussion and Conclusions

This survey was meant to investigate issues and habits of students regarding their self-regulation and their documenting behavior. A diverse group of 116 students from different departments, instruments, and study-years indicates that students report moderate to relatively high beliefs on their overall self-regulation. However, more than half of the students is worried about their studies of career. Although many students think about their process, less students report to document by writing things down, especially when the students are filtered on who does this at least weekly, and on more than only two things (like only repertoire and notes from lessons). The 44% of students who do meet these criteria of solid documenting, report significantly higher self-regulation in terms of Goals and Focus, but the difference on Self-confidence was not significant. When reviewing the reports on what content students document and what they find important to track, it is especially noteworthy that there is a considerable percentage of students who don’t track an aspects but would find it important. Even if some of them thought it was the socially desirable answer to say ‘important’, there is still a number of students in these groups who deliberately choose not just ‘important’ but ‘very important’. Those students could benefit most from some support in tracking their process for their benefit.

Limitations

A limitation of this survey is that it is a survey. Students report their own beliefs and behavior. For example, there is a chance that to some extend students have been confirming what they thought is the right answer. By understanding what the questionnaire is about students may (unintentionally) respond affirmatively on such questions. In other parts of the survey this effect was countered by asking many different questions and allowing multiple answers while only using one option or combination of options as the ‘right’ answer. For example, this was done for the question on the way of documenting: students were asked to fill in multiple options like talking with others and recording a well, while only the students who reported to document by writing things down were taken in the analysis of comparing those who document with those who don’t.

One more important note is that although we see a clear difference between students’ overall self-regulation reports on the basis of their documenting behavior, we cannot know for sure which one affects the other. A future study should investigate whether solid documenting by students actually increases self-regulation. Until then, it may be best to assume that they go hand in hand. 

Note. Displayed factor loadings are pattern matrix of an Oblimin Rotated PCA.

Figure 3. Percentage of reported content of documenting. Selecting multiple answers was possible.

For students who report to write things down, using various pieces papers and notebooks is the most common method, closely followed by using a journal, as can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 5. Perceived importance of documentation, by only students who do not track that aspect.

Table 1
Mean responses and factor loadings of overall indications of self-regulation

Figure 2. Percentage of students who report to write things down in particular ways. 
Selecting multiple answers was possible.

Figure 1. Reported use of specific ways of reflection and documentation. Students could mark multiple options.

Dear student

Would you be willing to do this survey to help with research on musicians learning processes? You name will be in no way shared, used or displayed in the resulting research output.

Many thanks for your contribution

Susan Williams

1. Study year:

2. Age:

3. Instrument 

4. Department:

5. To what extent are the following statements true? Indicate with a number from 1-7, where 1= not at all and 7= extremely:

I worry about not having enough time for everything       

I am confident that I can achieve my goals for my study

I have clear goals and intentions

I have a lot of methods and strategies for learning

I have trust in my methods and strategies

I worry about my ability to succeed as a musician

I rely on my main subject teacher to steer my development 

I have trust in my own ability to steer my development

I am good at organisation and time management 

I have a clear idea about the musician I want to be

I enjoy practicing

I enjoy performing

I share my goals, methods and strategies with other students 

6. How do you reflect on your process (indicate as many as are relevant)

☐ Not at all                 

☐ In my head 

☐ I talk with people                

☐ I write things down 

☐ I record things (audio &/or video)

7. If you write things down, how do you do this?

☐ On various pieces of paper & notebooks

☐ In a journal

☐ On your computer or tablet

☐ On your phone

8. What kinds of things do you document?

☐ Repertoire 

☐ Notes from your lessons 

☐ Insights and observations from your practice 

☐ Goals and intentions

☐ Strategies plans or processes for learning

☐ Things you’ve been doing: performances masterclasses and projects 

☐ Things that help, motivate or inspire you 

☐ Achievements 

☐ Tracking things (e.g. motivation, health, engagement, energy) 

Details:

☐ Other

9. If you wrote ‘other’, what is it? 

10. What items do you find important to document or track?  Indicate with: 1=Not important, 2=Important or 3=Very Important

☐ Repertoire 

☐ Notes from your lessons 

☐ Insights and observations from your practice 

☐ Goals and intentions

☐ Strategies plans or processes for learning

☐ Things you’ve been doing: performances masterclasses and projects 

☐ Things that help, motivate or inspire you 

☐ Achievements 

☐ Tracking things (e.g. motivation, health, engagement, energy) 

☐ Other

11. Is there anything else that you find important to document? What?

12. How often do you journal / document your process?

☐ Most days               ☐ A few times a week ☐ Around once a week            

☐ Less than once a week         ☐ Rarely         ☐ Not at all                 

13. If you journal / document things, how much do you enjoy doing it? From 1-7 where 1=not at all and 7= extremely: 

☐

Survey

Enabling SLR in Conservatoires

The third research question was ‘How can conservatoires and teachers enable better SRL in their students?’ The answer involves having and imparting more awareness of the nature and importance of SRL and offering strategies and tools that are perceived as relevant by the students. Although most teachers deal with self-regulated learning in some formin their lessons, this is often implicit. This could come from the main subject teacher in the form of advice about organising practice and what to notice or focus on as well as checking whether a student has reflected on their development and can tell what their own strengths and weaknesses are. In addition, they can help a student to develop their own intrinsic feedback – i.e. being able to tell themselves how well they have played. In addition it could be beneficial to provide students with a mentor or tutor whose job includes helping the student be able to document and reflect on their own learning process.

The curriculum of a conservatoire needs to have space where the students can themselves learn about SRL and implement SRL strategies. Emphasis needs to be made on helping students to not only develop technical and musical skills and knowledge but meta-cognition – understanding how and why the processes work. 

Recommendations for conservatoires based on this research are:

• Train staff to understand explicitly what self-regulated learning is and how they can implement it in their lessons.
• Have a database of tools and methods for all staff and students to use, as well as tutorials explaining them.
• Include information and application of SRL in the curriculum so that every student has had some exposure to what it is, why it is important and how they can develop (and continue to develop) their own effective learning process.

As part of this research, a self-reflective journal for musicians was developed that incorporated and practice and performance log. This journal was informed by the preliminary interventions and pilot study under the assumption that it could help to enable students’ SRL. A detailed rationale and description of the journal follows in the next chapter.