Assessment

I recently read the ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Digital Dilemma by Gerald C. Van Dusen. In discussing quality and effectiveness of distance education, he discussed six types of assessments - summative or formative, formal or informal, quantitative and qualitative.

Students in my school system must take formative assessments every few weeks. A formative evaluation is an ongoing process that is used to assess instruction at all points of a course while a summative assessment evaluates the effectiveness of a course after its completion. Weekly quizzes would be considered a formative assessment while a comprehensive final exam would be a summative assessment. Using a backward design model and the curriculum, my plan is to create different types of assessments to use throughout the year and tailor my teaching to my assessments to make sure that all bases have been covered.

Formal assessments uses grades from texts, quizzes, term papers, etc. to evaluate student achievement while informal assessment evaluates student learning by via participant observation in group discussion or when answering questions. Music teachers do a good job of informal assessment, but we have to do a better job of formally assessing student performance. Colleagues encourage us to go down our class roll, record the objective, and mark the names of students who cannot perform the task to make it easier on the teacher or uses a system of marks to identify mastery and non-mastery.

Quantitative assessments can me statistically calculated and analyzed. Multiple choice and true-false tests are examples of quantitative assessments. Qualitative assessments allow students to reveal their depth of knowledge by forcing students to use higher level thinking skills. Essay questions, evaluation rubrics and projects are examples of qualitative assessments.

With the knowledge of the types of assessments available to music teachers and the creative ways in which we can assess student performance, formative and summative assessments, the addition of formal assessments to informal assessments, and qualitative and quantitative testing, can do more to bolster our claims that we are teaching students the fundamentals of music based on the curriculum.

What does this have to do with technology? I plan to explore websites, music software, etc. that can aid music teachers in assessing behaviors and assignments where students must use technology to show musical competence.