According to music educators, persistence beyond a student's initial enrollment in middle and high school music is a problem; however, there has been little research to substantiate this claim. Although several recent large-scale, longitudinal studies of initial selection into music classes have been conducted, longitudinal studies on who…

Although flow theory is one way of measuring the quality of a student's experience in a music ensemble, the majority of flow research utilizes samples of high school or collegiate level musicians thus causing us to generalize findings to young adolescent (middle school) populations. Using a convergent parallel mixed methods design, the purpose of…

The purpose of this study was to fit theoretical models of prediction to students' decisions to enroll and persist in urban middle school band programs using independent variables of academic achievement, socioeconomic status (SES), family structure, mobility, ethnicity, and gender. Two models were fitted to the data using logistic regression…

This study is the second in a series of investigations attempting to clarify relationships between variables that impact on a young musician's ability to perform music (as assessed on a graded music examination). Consistent with studies on school academic subjects, our previous investigation demonstrated the importance of self-efficacy in…