Teaching and psychological associations of adolescent piano composition skills: a study on constructivist practices and reflective guidance based on teacher reports

To understand the connection between open teaching environments and musical creative performance, this study focuses on adolescent piano teaching, examining the structural associations among constructivist practices, reflective guidance, and piano composition skills, and analyzing the parallel indirect associations linked via creative self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation for composition.

A cross-sectional questionnaire design was adopted, based on the analysis of 723 self-reports from teachers with adolescent piano teaching experience and their evaluation data on students' states and skills. Multivariate regression and Bootstrap resampling methods were used for statistical path testing, comparing group distribution characteristics under different learning purposes, and testing the boundary conditions formed by the frequency of composition teaching.

(1) Both constructivist practices and reflective guidance showed significant positive associations with the evaluated piano composition skills; (2) Creative self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation for composition presented significant parallel indirect paths in the above associations; (3) The overall differences among groups with different learning purposes on all core constructs reached statistical significance, with the descriptive means of the grading test or competition group generally being lower than those of the hobby group; (4) No significant moderating phenomenon of composition teaching frequency on the association between constructivist practices and intrinsic motivation was found.

Autonomous decision-making and process scrutiny are independently and positively associated with teacher-evaluated student composition skills, respectively. These teaching practice characteristics, together with students' capability beliefs and internal willingness to participate, constitute the relevant conditions for musical practice. However, as these internal psychological states are inferred by teachers for whole groups rather than evaluated at the individual level, interpretations regarding direct psychological mechanisms remain limited. In teaching applications, compared with simply increasing the frequency of activities, improving the design quality of open and reflective tasks may be of more practical significance.