Page 62 - How to Shine on Stage

The authors particularly stress the importance of attribution. Attri-
butions play an important role in achieving performance success or ex-
periencing failure (Weiner, 1986). It has become evident that the reasons
for failure are more often attributed to the invested effort and strategies
used than to internal capabilities. This means that if one attributes the
cause of failure to insufficient effort or flawed strategies, these attribu-
tions are usually perceived as controllable, internal, and unstable, and
can therefore change with the next task.
60 McPherson and McCormick (1999) studied the dimensions of mo-

tivation and self-regulated learning in the instrumental music practice.
The results of their research revealed that students who report higher
levels of cognitive strategy application during practice also report high-
How to Shine on Stage musicians practise more, but their practice is also more efficient. Siw
er levels of intrinsic value for learning their instrument. Not only do such

Graabraek Nielsen (2008) explored performance goals, learning strat-
egies, and instrumental performance of music students, as well as stu-
dents’ learning strategies when practising an instrument (Nielsen, 2011).

2.1.7 Practice
Practice is certainly one of the key mechanisms of self-regulation in
learning an instrument/singing. It includes all three cognitive strategies
of the self-regulation process, namely repetition, elaboration, and organ-
ization, but also the metacognitive strategies. It also includes motivation-
al beliefs and strategies.
The practice of instrument/singing at home is crucial for the de-
velopment and consolidation of skills that a student learns in their in-
strument/singing lessons. There is a broad terminology available to
describe music practice: we can speak of deliberate practice with a fo-
cus on achieving specific goals, of formal and informal practice, and of
structured and unstructured practice (Zhukov, 2009).
Deliberate, formal, and structured practice is used to master skills,
which produces the achievement of performance goals, whereas un-
structured practice is claimed to be ineffective in terms of expertise de-
velopment (Barry & Hallam, 2002). Informal practice is an important
contributor to maintaining internal motivation and enjoyment in music
making (Zhukov, 2021).
Instrument practice is a psychomotor learning process. It consists of
acquiring new kinds of movement and integrating the existing ones into
new systems. The results of such learning are motor habits and skills.
Psychomotor instrument learning is possible by trial and error, by imi-