What do music teachers think about musically gifted students?

An experimental investigation

Abstract

In schools, teachers’ beliefs of gifted students often fit the so-called “disharmony stereotype“. This means that whilst their achievement, compared to non-gifted students, is perceived more positively, their behaviour and personality are often falsely evaluated more negatively. Such an analysis has not been carried out for the possible stereotyping of musically gifted students by music school teachers. Therefore, this study examined the beliefs of 212 music school teachers of musically gifted students. The experiment was designed such that the students‘ brief descriptions (case vignettes), ability (high vs. average performance) and gender (male vs. female) of a student were randomly assigned to the music school teachers. The data were evaluated using multivariate analyses of variance and discriminant analyses. Musically gifted students were rated in accordance with the disharmony stereotype regarding their achievement and behavioural characteristics, and also partly according to their personality (η²_p = .287 to .437). The results were independent of the students’ gender. The practical implications for music education are discussed.