The Students' Academic Performance at the Conservatory of Music: A Structural Model from the Motivational Variables

The aim of this research is to analyze the relationships between several motivational variables in the teaching Music context during the Professional Grade of Music at the Conservatory. More specifically, it is tried to analyze the relationships between the students' self-concept, their causal attributions, their academic goals and their content goals, and the relationships between all of them and the academic performance, in that context. The participants are 209 Conservatory students, males and women, who learn to play a wide range of musical instruments, with an average age of 17.25 years old. All of them answer four closed-ended questionnaires: the AF-5 Questionnaire (Musitu & Garcia, 1999), the Goal Questionnaire (Wentzel, 1989), the Multidimensional Causal Attributions Evaluation Scale (Barca, 2000) and the Academic Goal Questionnaire (Hayamizu & Weiner, 1991). In general, the causal diagram's results show adequate fit indices and corroborate the relations between the variables which were set out from the theoretical framework. However, it is observed a curious positive relation between the poor performance-low capacity attribution and the academic self-concept.