Oboe Practice Competition
At the beginning of this year, I decided to hold a practice competition for my oboe students. It was held over an 8-week period, from February 10 to April 5, 2020. I wanted to make sure that it would be possible for every student to achieve an award, so I offered several different award categories. There was an award for most practice overall, most practice in one weekend and school champion (I teach at five different schools). There were also Gold, Silver and Bronze awards for reaching a certain amount of practice. For example, practising for an average of 30 minutes each day, 5 days per week would earn you a Gold award.
22 students were invited to take part in this competition. The results of five students were excluded from my analysis as they recorded either zero or less than 15 minutes of practice. As this study depended on the honesty of my students to accurately record their practice times, I cannot guarantee how reliable these results are. I’ve published a data visualisation showing my findings on Tableau Public.
The records showed that on average, practice levels were highest in the third week. In this week, students recorded an average of 14 minutes of practice. After the first three weeks, practice levels dropped, then gradually increased over the last three weeks.
An interesting point to note is that this practice competition started in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. In week 5 of the competition, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared it a pandemic, and in weeks 6 and 7, all five of the schools I worked at transitioned to online oboe lessons (instead of face-to-face tuition). Whether or not this had an effect on the practice habits of my students is a bit beyond the scope of this study, however it is something I do wonder about.
Anyway, the most popular day for practising was Monday. On this day, students practised for an average of 13 minutes. The least popular day was Friday, which had an average of 7 minutes. On average, students practised for 9.6 minutes each day.
The winner of the competition practised for an average of 24.5 minutes per day and practised the most on Saturdays and Fridays.
One thing I learned from this study is that holding a practice competition doesn’t magically motivate all students to start practising. But it did seem to motivate a handful of students. I found that my students generally fell into these three categories:
Group 1 — practised consistently throughout the competition (6 students).
Group 2 — practised in the first few weeks then stopped (12 students).
Group 3 — didn’t do any practice (4 students).
And finally, I now know how to spell the word.
To use it as a verb, it needs an S: “I practised the oboe because it is awesome.”
To use it as a noun, it needs a C: “I did some oboe practice because my teacher told me to.”
