Modeling Relationships Among Classroom Environment, Motivation, and Creativity in Secondary Students’ Digital Music Compositions

Technology-based music classrooms differ structurally from traditional, teacher-directed settings, where self-paced, individualized composition with digital audio workstations may change how classroom environment and motivation relate to students’ creative output. Research on compositional creativity has rarely modeled these two factors together, and even less often in technology-mediated, self-paced contexts. This study tested a theoretical model examining the relationships among the classroom environment, motivation, and creativity of secondary students’ digital music compositions. High school students (N = 146) enrolled in technology-based music courses completed self-report measures of motivation and classroom environment and produced a digital composition in GarageBand as a self-paced compositional task without teacher-paced instruction. Eleven quasi-expert raters evaluated the compositions using the Consensual Assessment Technique, and structural equation modeling tested the hypothesized pathways. None of the three direct paths reached statistical significance: Classroom Environment with Creativity (β = 0.14, p = 0.26), Classroom Environment with Motivation (β = −0.17, p = 0.15), and Motivation with Creativity (β = 0.08, p = 0.42). Motivation also did not mediate the relationship between Classroom Environment and Creativity (β = −0.01, p = 0.50). These results did not support the hypothesized relationships in this self-paced technology-mediated context, although the sample was likely underpowered to detect small effects and the Classroom Environment structure was derived empirically from the sample.