Mental strategies matter more than practice time for beginning instrumentalists

What this study actually measured

Most assessments of beginning instrumentalists focus on one thing: can you reproduce the piece you practiced from notation? McPherson's study deliberately measured five distinct types of musical performance:

• Performing rehearsed music: playing a prepared piece from notation

• Sight-reading: accurately reading music never previously seen

• Playing from memory: reproducing a melody learned from notation, then performed without it

• Playing by ear: reproducing a melody heard on a recording

• Improvising: creating original music without notation

The reason this matters is that most school band programs assess almost exclusively on the first skill. A student learns a piece, plays it at the end of year concert, and everyone moves on. McPherson's argument, grounded in decades of prior work on musicianship, is that this narrow measure misses most of what actually predicts whether a child will develop into a real musician.

Alongside these performance tests, McPherson interviewed the children's mothers throughout the study to estimate accumulated practice time, and asked the children themselves to describe exactly what they were thinking while performing each task. That second data source is where things get interesting.

The five performance skills

By the end of year three, most children had improved on all five measures. That's the expected finding. What is more striking is the spread: some year-three students had not reached the average score of their peers at the end of year one. For improvisation, 20 percent of third-year students were still performing below the year-one mean. For sight-reading, 19 percent.

The study also tracked correlations across years: children who were relatively good or relatively weak at a skill in year one tended to stay in the same relative position in years two and three. Year-one sight-reading scores correlated with year-three scores at .74. Year-one playing-by-ear scores correlated with year-three at .62. The rank order is not destiny, but it is far more stable than most teachers might expect.

One practical signal from the data: children who scored in the bottom half of the sample on sight-reading in year one were significantly more likely to quit before the study ended (chi-square = 11.49, p < .001). The same was true for playing by ear (chi-square = 5.07, p = .02). Early struggles in these two skills in particular, not just in performing rehearsed music, predicted dropout.

Practice time alone does not explain who succeeds

Here is the finding that cuts against the standard advice. McPherson ran stepwise regression analyses to determine how much of the variance in each skill could be explained by accumulated practice versus the mental strategies students reported using. The results split cleanly based on which skill you're looking at.

For performing rehearsed music, practice time entered the regression first and explained the most variance: 9 percent in year one, rising to 32 percent by year three. Mental strategies added some explanatory power, but practice was the dominant predictor. This makes sense. Performing a piece you have rehearsed many times is, among the five skills, the one most directly rewarded by sheer repetition.

For the other three skills, the picture reverses sharply. Strategy was the dominant predictor in every year:

Why does this happen? McPherson's explanation draws on the concept of "thinking in sound": the ability to form accurate mental representations of music aurally and link those representations to physical playing. Students who developed better mental strategies early on were not just more efficient practitioners. They were building a fundamentally different cognitive relationship with their instruments. They could hear music inwardly before and while they played it, rather than translating notation mechanically into finger movements without an auditory image in between.

Companion research cited by McPherson found that over 90 percent of beginning students' home practice time was spent simply playing through pieces from start to finish, without adopting specific improvement strategies. Beginners often do not know where they are going wrong. They have not yet developed the internal aural reference points to identify and correct their own errors.

What mental strategies look like in practice

McPherson categorized strategies for each of the four non-improvisation skills. For memory tasks, he identified a hierarchy running from weakest to strongest:

The pattern held across sight-reading and playing by ear as well. Students who prepared by mentally connecting sound to physical production consistently outperformed students who focused on visual information alone (note names, fingering positions, contour) or who had only a rough kinaesthetic sense of the melody.

The percentage of students using the stronger strategies grew over the three years, which is expected. What matters for teaching is that the students who arrived at musically sophisticated strategies earliest were the ones who pulled ahead and stayed ahead.

For sight-reading specifically, McPherson tracked five preparation strategies: studying the first measure, identifying the key signature, identifying the time signature, establishing an appropriate tempo before starting, and scanning the music to identify obstacles. All five increased in prevalence across the three years, with the exception of establishing an appropriate tempo (which appeared to become automatic for proficient students and thus less consciously reported). By year three, 60 percent of students reported studying the first measure, 56 percent reported checking the key signature, but only 20 percent reported scanning for obstacles. That last strategy is among the most useful for performance accuracy and remains underdeveloped even by year three.

For rehearsal strategies at home, McPherson identified four dimensions that distinguish more from less effective practice: keeping track of what needs to be learned (using a practice diary actively), the order of practice (tackling assigned repertoire before enjoyment pieces), persistence with difficult passages, and self-correction strategies (ranging from giving up, to trial and error, to deliberately slowing down and identifying trouble spots before speeding back up).

Early struggles predict dropout

The dropout numbers in this study are worth noting carefully, not as an argument about causation, but because they match what directors already see.

The students who quit were not random. They were disproportionately concentrated in the bottom half of year-one scores on sight-reading and playing by ear. Children who showed early weakness in aural skills, specifically, were at higher dropout risk than children who were merely slow at performing rehearsed repertoire.

The practical implication is uncomfortable but clarifying: if a teacher's only data point is how well students perform their assigned pieces, they are missing the two skills that best predict who will still be in the program two years later.

This connects to a broader observation McPherson makes about current teaching practice. Research reviewed in the paper found that instrumental lessons tend to be dominated by teacher statements about what to do, with very little time spent asking students what they are thinking, modeling cognitive strategies, or encouraging metacognitive reflection. Elementary school teachers in general, as cited by McPherson, devoted only about 9.5 percent of instructional time to cognitive processes, with specific strategy instruction occurring around 2.8 percent of the time.

What teachers can do with this

McPherson offers a framework for what strategy-focused teaching looks like in practice. It is less about new activities and more about a different conversational register during lessons:

• Ask students to explain what they are doing, not just to do it better. "Can you tell me what you're thinking about when you start that phrase?" is different from "Play it again and watch your rhythm." The former builds metacognitive awareness. The second reinforces task completion without building the internal monitoring that leads to independent improvement.

• Give content-specific guidance on how to approach a task, not just what to fix. "In order to memorize this passage, try singing it while you finger through it" is more useful than "Memorize this for next week."

• React to performance errors by asking what the student is thinking, not just by correcting the output. A student who plays the wrong note because they are reading notation mechanically without an auditory image needs a different intervention than a student who simply misread the rhythm.

• Include aural skills from the start, not as a supplement. Playing by ear and improvisation are not extras for advanced students or gifted children. They are the mechanisms by which students build the internal sound representations that make everything else easier. Students who are taught only from notation, and only assessed on their ability to reproduce practiced notation, are being set up to plateau.

One caveat McPherson acknowledges: the study could not fully capture practice quality. Videotape analysis of children's home practice cited in the paper showed that most practice time was spent running through pieces from beginning to end, which limits how much strategy instruction in lessons can compensate for what happens at home without any supervision.

Teachers cannot be present during home practice. But they can change what students understand practice to be for.