Epistemic beliefs and self-regulated learning in music students

In the context of advanced instrumental learning, this study had two purposes: to investigate the relationships of epistemic beliefs to first-year music students’ self-reported learning strategies in practising a musical instrument, and to examine the adaption of a measure of academic personal epistemology to the musical domain. One hundred and thirty music students (71 women and 59 men) from six music academies/conservatoires filled out questionnaires detailing their epistemic beliefs and strategy use. To some degree, the factor analysis showed cross-subject generalizability in the dimensions of epistemic beliefs in the music version of the original measure. The four dimensions found were: certainty of knowledge (α = .64); control of knowledge acquisition (α = .66); ambiguity of knowledge (α = .56); and simplicity of knowledge (α = .50). Beliefs about the control of knowledge acquisition and the simplicity of knowledge were significantly related to strategies, but the correlations were low. Gender and degree programme were also significantly related to epistemic beliefs.

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