Teacher Feedback in Collegiate Instrumental Music Lessons

Abstract

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” ..