A survey of Colorado orchestra teachers' curricular and extracurricular activities

Abstract

The arts play an important economic role in Colorado, contributing 3.9% of the state's GDP ($16.9 billion) in 2021 (Hunt & Schultz, 2023). Colorado is home to a diverse array of activities in the orchestral realm including prestigious music festivals (e.g., Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Chautauqua), the National Repertory Orchestra, and the Boulder Suzuki Strings program. Despite the strong presence of orchestras in the state, not much is known about Colorado orchestra teachers. Researchers have gathered school orchestra program data nationally (Elpus, 2015; Elpus & Abril, 2019; Gillespie & Hamann, 1998; Hamann & Gillespie, 2002; Smith et. al, 2018) showing trends of an increase of orchestra student enrollment and a decrease of orchestra teachers. At the state level, researchers have suggested there is a disparity of access to string education (Miller, 2024; Saccardi, 2024) and a possible connection between string student enrollment and teacher attrition (Elpus & Miller, 2023). (Chappell & Nussbaum, 2023; Saccardi, 2024; Miller, 2024; Miller et al., 2021). No specific quantitative survey has been done for Colorado secondary orchestra programs. The purpose of this study was to survey Colorado secondary orchestra teachers, identify the activities they engage in with their students both in and out of school, and examine how these activities relate to their motivations for teaching orchestra. Expectancy-value theory (EVT) serves as a framework for this study, which suggests that an individual's expectancies, values, and perceived costs effects the likelihood they will persist in a task (Eccles et al., 1983; Sin et al., 2022; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000). While EVT has been used to examine student motivations, there is little research that examines the motivations of orchestra teachers, specifically in the realm of EVT. The following research questions were investigated: (1) What are the characteristics (e.g., age, years of experience, primary instrument of study) of secondary Colorado orchestra teachers? (2) What curricular practices do Colorado orchestra teachers engage in with their students in school (3) What extracurricular activities do orchestra teachers engage in with their students? (4) What are the relationships between the expectancies, values, and perceived costs of teaching music with the curricular and extracurricular activities that Colorado orchestra teachers engage in with their students? Participants in this study included secondary orchestra teachers in Colorado who taught at least one orchestra class within the school day during the 2024-2025 academic school year. Data were collected through an anonymous questionnaire online. The questionnaire collected demographic information regarding teacher and school characteristics as well as the curricular and extracurricular activities they engaged in. Additionally, the expectancies, subjective task values, and costs of participants regarding teaching orchestra were assessed using items adapted from prior studies (Conley, 2012; Perez et al., 2019). Measures of central tendency were employed to analyze demographic and activity data, then compared with expectancies, subjective task values, and cost using correlational analyses and independent sample t-tests. Some salient findings of this study include differences between the expectancies of string and non-string players, expectancies and values of male- and female-identifying participants, and high variance of cost values. However, this study had a relatively small sample size and is likely not representative of the entire orchestra-teaching population of Colorado.