Assessment
The teacher understands and uses formal and informal assessment strategies to ensure the continuous intellectual, social, and physical development of the learner.
Assessment is both a valuable tool and a practical necessity for music teachers. Assessment as a way of measuring student learning is a great way to discover a teacher's effectiveness. The feedback received, in turn, can influence a teacher's curriculum and lesson plans. This cycle of assessment, feedback, and re-evaluation of curriculum can develop into an efficient and effective way to operate a classroom.
The ways in which teachers can perform these assessments are quite varied in themselves. Tools such as checklists, rubrics, and evaluation portfolios can help teachers assess their students in more thorough, authentic ways. Personally, I believe that an assessment rubric is one of the most effective tools for evaluation - letting students know ahead of time how they will be assessed will help set them up for success by letting them know exactly how to prepare. Rubrics also allow for quick but effective feedback to students, who will be able to tell exactly where they can improve and where their strong parts are. Effective rubrics are, however, difficult to write. I hope to continue to develop my skills at creating these assessment tools.
Assessment is also a necessity as a means of fairly executing student evaluations. Whereas assessment simply measures student learning, evaluation puts a value ranking on student learning. This most often translates to the grading of students. In many music classes, student grading is done merely as a combination of participation and attendance. With all the different kinds of learning that occur in music classrooms, this is hardly fair to students! Instead, evaluation should be based upon all the different things which students have achieved over the course of a semester, as in the other core courses.
Since music students learn a wide variety of skills, which are expressed through a variety of modalities, so too assessment in music classes must come from a diverse set of measurements. Traditional tests, both cognitive and psychomotor, should be included in student assessment, but so too should student reflections, student evaluations, student practice time, and students' creative projects. While logistically tricky to implement, it seems to me that the portfolio system of assessment and evaluation is the most authentic to a music classroom. I hope to work on ways in which such assessments can be made practical in large ensemble situations. I believe that utilizing technology can be effective in this way, but my own high school chorus teacher was able to effectively implement portfolio systems of assessment using only paper, cassette tapes, and manila folders, so I know that this type of authentic assessment can be possibly with a variety of different resources.
Assessment Artifacts
A Rewards System as an Assessment Tool (PDF File)
As I reflect on an observation made of a children's chorus for my Spring 2007 Choral Methods class, I discuss the teacher's system of rewards that she uses in her classroom. She uses this system as a part of her assessment structure. This includes assessment of individual and group performance done by both the students and the teacher. This seems to be a fairly effective way of using formative assessment in the classroom.
Assessment Plan and Results for Teacher Work Sample (PDF File)
This Teacher Work Sample, implemented during a high school AP Music Theory Class in the spring of 2009, was designed to determine whether introducing students to pattern-recognition exercises would help them improve their rhythmic sight-singing skills. Students were assessed on their skills in reading compound meter rhythms prior to lessons involving pattern recognition, assessed as a group as part of a formative assessment process during the lessons, and assessed after the lessons had been completed. The assessment plan, examples, and results are detailed in this excerpt of the entire Teacher Work Sample.
Assessment Plan for Old Churches (PDF File)
This file consists of both cognitive and psychomotor assessment tools to be used in the unit I developed in the fall of 2006 for Michael Colgrass' composition Old Churches for beginning band. The first assessment is a standard quiz measuring students' learning of historical, cultural, and musical background for the piece. The second is a rubric that can be used to assess students' progress in playing the musical elements of the piece. The rubric would be handed out to students in advance of the assessment, and would likely be given more than once over the course of the unit to document student progress.
Choral Assessment Rubric (PDF File)
This is a rubric I developed as a form of authentic assessment in a high school choral setting. To implement this rubric, a student would video-record him or herself singing an excerpt of literature from the choral ensemble. Following the performance, both the teacher and student would fill out this rubric judging the student's performance at the exercise. Students would be given quick and accurate feedback regarding their own individual contributions to the ensemble, and see where they may need to improve. By asking the student to fill out a form for themselves, they are becoming active in the process of improvement, self-assessment, and reflection.
Music Report Card Supplement (PDF File)
This document is a music report card supplement to be sent home along with a child's regular report cards. This would give both the child and the parent more detailed feedback than a regular report card typically provides on specific strengths and developing skills that students exhibit in a music class. It demonstrates my commitment to giving students maximum feedback in a music class so that they are best able to improve. It also demonstrates what I believe to be the most important categories for assessment in an elementary general music classroom.
Graphic Organizers (PDF File)
The following Graphic Organizers were created in the fall of 2008 for a Literacy Across the Content Areas course. They are designed as a form of assessment in music classrooms that allow students to express what they know in a visual format. These organizers encourage critical thinking skills in a number of different musical domains.
Rhythm Worksheet - I've Got a Car (PDF File)
This worksheet was designed during the spring of 2009 as a way to assess third grade students on their understanding of rhythmic concepts. Although this worksheet was filled out individually by students, it was an active rather than passive exercise. The class was led through each line of the song by the teacher. Before writing down the rhythms, students clapped and sang each line together. Once the teacher was confident that the students were hearing and clapping the rhythm correctly, then the students were able to write out their answers.
Assessing Development of Steady Beat (Quicktime Movie File)
Assessment Embedded in a Lesson (Quicktime Movie File)
Evaluation Component of a WebQuest (Web Link)
This section of a WebQuest designed for use by choral students learning "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" describes for the students the process by which they will be evaluated on their completion of the project. It outlines exactly how their grades will be weighted and links to the exact rubric which will be used to calculate their scores. In addition to demonstrating my ability to create authentic and diverse assessments for the choral classroom, this kind of assessment also demonstrates my belief that students will perform at their highest level when they know exactly what is expected from them.
Formative Group Assessment in Sight-Singing (Quicktime Movie File)