What's new in pedagogy research?

American Music Teacher, June-July, 2004 by Rebecca Grooms Johnson

Most of us have a deeply personal understanding of performance anxiety. Not only do we deal with our own anxieties when we play, we also must try to help our students understand how and why their bodies react to performance stresses and how to cope with the symptoms. But do our female students experience performance anxiety in the same way our male students do? A recent research study by Charlene Ryan investigated gender differences in how children experience musical performance anxiety. (1) Most studies in performance anxiety have focused on university music majors and professional musicians, but children also experience anxiety in performance situations, whether in the classroom, on the stage or on the athletic field. This study investigated both the experience of anxiety in children and the relationship between anxiety and gender.

Twenty-six children from the sixth grade in an urban school participated in this study. They received piano lessons from the faculty of a large conservatory, where they were required to take annual piano exams, and they had performed on at least one recital prior to this study. The children's heart rates were recorded over two sessions. The first baseline rate was recorded during a forty-five-minute piano lesson. The second rate was recorded in a formal recital situation, from the time the child went in a group to the side of the stage to await playing, to the time he or she exited the stage after performing. The rates were recorded every fifteen seconds, and averages were calculated for the baseline rate, the "waiting to play" rate and the "during playing" rate. Each child completed a standardized test, which indicated whether they felt high, medium or low levels of anxiety. Open-ended questions also were given to gauge their feelings about playing on the recital. The recital was videotaped and evaluated in fifteen-second blocks to evaluate five categories of anxious behaviors: feet and legs, body, arms and hands, instrument and head and face. The tapes were reviewed a second time to examine external events in three categories:

* Distractions Around the Child

* Distractions in the Audience

* Other Errors (memory slips, false starts, technical errors and so on)

Two expert pianists also viewed the taped performances and numerically rated the quality of each child's performance as low, moderate or high.

The results of the study seem to indicate there are differences in the way boys and girls respond to performance anxiety. The girls' average heart rates increased steadily from the baseline to the "waiting to play" to the actual performance, indicating anticipatory anxiety, as well as performance anxiety. The boys did not have a significant increase in average heart rate between the baseline and "waiting to play" numbers. Once the boys actually started to perform, however, their heart rate increased dramatically and actually exceeded the girls'. "The boys seemed to react physiologically to the performance situation only when directly confronted with it." (2)

When analyzing the videotapes, the researchers found, "Boys displayed significantly more anxious behaviors than girls both prior to and during the recital. It is possible that the boys used physical activity as a coping mechanism to distract them from the impending performance situation, and that this physical activity also helped them to maintain the lower heart rates that were observed." (3) Their lower "waiting to perform" heart rate is interesting in light of the fact that the boys said they felt most anxious before the performance experience. There also was some indication that boys who had more anxious behaviors before performing usually performed better.

The girls' anxiety measures were more connected than the boys'--the girls with more anxious behaviors before playing also had higher heart rates prior to playing. Although there was some indication that the level of anxiety impacted the girls' level of performance more than the boys', the researcher believed there were too many possible explanations for these results to draw any conclusions from them.

The children's comments indicated that family, teachers and friends sometimes tried to help ease the student's anxiety by saying, "Don't worry," advocating practice and focusing on the technical aspects of the performance. Although practice is, of course, important for successful performances, research has not shown it to help anxious performers relieve their anxiety. (4) It appeared to be the students themselves who were finding ways of successfully coping. Ryan concludes:

   Teachers should ... be wary of
   leading students to believe that
   technical perfection is the ultimate
   goal in performance. While technical
   proficiency is an important
   component of performance, so is
   musical expressiveness. Perhaps
   more emphasis on the latter might
   reduce students' rumination on
   "not making any mistakes." Since
   fear of errors was clearly tied up
   with students' anxiety in this
   study, it seems that reducing this
   fear might effectively reduce performance
   anxiety and, in doing
   so, reduce the number of errors in
   performances. (5)