The article Assessment on Our Own Terms by Samuel Hope and Mark Wait is an important read for music educators and anyone who deals with arts education, assessment, or policy connected to arts assessment or evaluation.
The article makes a strong case for staying true to assessment that makes the most sense for music education and leads to improvement and learning.
Towards the end of the article, Hope and Wait (2013) address the importance of having a strong foundation in arts expertise and assessment along with making a case for assessment on our own terms that can benefit students the most. They provide a list of well thought out and elegantly-crafted questions that would greatly contribute to discourse surrounding assessment in arts education.
While music educators pressured to engage in standardized testing and assessment measures that put quantifiable data ahead of more detailed, accurate, and valuable types of assessment may not always have opportunities to pose the following questions; imagine how parents, guardians, and community supporters of education and the arts could impact assessment discourse and potential policy decisions.
Consider discussing and sharing these questions with your local community for potential use during debates and discourse around assessment, evaluation, and testing:
Hope and Wait (2013) state:
There are probing debate questions that can challenge and show the conceptual weaknesses behind large-scale assessment systems.
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What empirical proof do you have that the assessment system and approach you are proposing will work better for our field than the systems we use now?
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What evidence can you provide that the world of higher education or the field of our discipline is structured, operates, or is organized conceptually in ways that makes your proposed approach more effective than ours?
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How can you prove to us that putting results in a form that you define as measurable will lead to improvement in student learning or to advancement and innovation in our field?
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What proof is there that all quality in every dimension of life can be engineered through the application of large- scale assessment systems, or that the larger and more centralized the assessment system, the higher the quality that will be produced?
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How is it possible to call for a deeply integrated system of standardization that allows results to be compared and at the same time call for innovation or a climate of innovation?
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Do you believe that students carry a great deal of responsibility for what they learn?
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Isn’t a model always a diminished version of the original?
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Can you prove that if we fashion a program that specifically works for us, we will fall behind?
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Can you prove that any numbers we collect about specific
performance indicators can predict the quality of education an individual student will receive or the success of that person after graduation? (p. 10)
Imagine how such questions posed by parents, guardians, and community members could broaden and deepen discussion of assessment at board of education meetings or sessions with policy makers. When combined with a strong understanding of rich and valuable assessment in music education, these questions may open space for thinking through the types of assessment and related policies that can benefit students. Perhaps we can work with parents, guardians, community members, and administrators, towards such goals.
The entire article is valuable to read: Hope, S., & Wait, M. (2013). Assessment on our own terms. Arts Education Policy Review, 114(2), 2-12. doi: 10.1080/10632913.2013.744235
You might be interested in additional resources on assessment in music education.