AI Insight
This mixed-methods study of 568 Chinese junior high school students found significant positive associations between perceived teacher support, music learning motivation, and student engagement in music classrooms. Statistical analysis revealed that music learning motivation served as a mediating factor linking teacher support to student engagement. Qualitative interviews with 15 students identified specific supportive teaching practices—including encouragement, emotional care, clear explanations, interactive support, and appropriately challenging content—that contributed to students' confidence, interest, and participation.
Why it matters
The findings suggest that music teachers can enhance student engagement by providing supportive classroom environments that foster learning motivation. Understanding these relationships may help educators develop more effective instructional strategies to improve student participation in music education, particularly in general school settings where music engagement is often underexplored.
Understand the Science
Student engagement in music classrooms is important because it reflects students’ active participation in listening, performing, and creative activities and is associated with academic, social, and psychological outcomes. Although teacher support has been widely linked to student engagement, the indirect association between perceived teacher support, music learning motivation, and engagement in music education remains underexplored, especially in general school settings. This mixed-methods study examined associations among students’ perceived teacher support, music learning motivation, and engagement in junior high school music classrooms. Survey data were collected from 568 junior high school students in urban and rural areas of Liaoning Province, Northeast China. Quantitative analyses examined associations among perceived teacher support, music learning motivation, and student engagement, and the SPSS PROCESS macro with 5,000 bootstrap samples was used to estimate the statistical indirect association. Semi-structured interviews with 15 students were analyzed through a three-level coding procedure to explain students’ learning experiences. The results showed significant positive associations among perceived teacher support, music learning motivation, and student engagement. Music learning motivation was statistically associated with the link between perceived teacher support and student engagement, and the bootstrap confidence interval for the indirect association did not include zero. Qualitative findings indicated that encouragement, emotional care, clear explanation, interactive support, and content aligned with students’ interests and abilities helped explain how students translated supportive classroom experiences into confidence, interest, and willingness to participate. Because the study used cross-sectional self-report data, the findings should be interpreted as associational rather than causal.