3-1 Assessment

The candidate understands how to use multiple measures to monitor and assess individual

student learning, engage learners in self-assessment, and use data to make decisions.

Assessment can take many different forms in the music classroom, and it's always

happening regardless of its formality. Assessment has to be reliable and valid to the point that it

measures and evaluates the objective and goals of the classroom. For the most part, formative

assessment is the most useful in the music classroom, because it informs the student and the

teacher of how they did, where they are strong, and where they need a little extra help.

Assessment tools such as a rubric can help teachers give direct feedback that is fair,

consistent, and unbiased. Rubrics will help define clear levels of accomplishment, it gives a

learning centered approach to assessment, and they are extremely versatile to adapt to any

specific assessment need. Holistic rubrics will give a score based on an overall assessment, for

example, giving a student an 85% because it looks like an 85%. An analytic rubric, on the other

hand, contains more that one evaluative criteria, and those criteria are then matched with the

appropriate descriptor. Analytic rubrics are the best way to give students concise feedback for

individual assessment.

Other forms of assessment such as peer and self assessment are extremely important

when teaching young musicians. Student musicians have to be taught the correct vocabulary of

how to talk intelligibly about music and how to give constructive criticism. When having

students do peer assessment, they will not only be helping their peers, but also helping

themselves. When giving time for peer assessment, teachers must also be assessing as well to

ensure that the feedback is constructive, appropriate, and musically correct. Self assessment can
be used when asking students to explain why they made a musical choice. If a student can

verbally describe his/her decision making process, we as teachers can further understand how our

students are thinking about the music as they play. From there we know what to work on, what to

change, and how to better help our students.

There are many more types of assessment tools to use in the music classroom such as:

portfolios, checklists, journaling, paper-pencil tests, presentations, and many others. All these

assessment types make evaluating our students growth and achievement, and give teachers the

opportunity to analyze, adjust, and help our students reach their highest potential.