As a whole, I think two significant assessment challenges face those who seek to bring quality music programs to students in the United States. We are first faced with the challenge of maintaining a balanced curriculum in an environment where dependence on large-scale, high stakes testing of students in a small range of programs (reading, math, and science) severely limits learning opportunities to those tested subject areas. In this regard, music educators, along with colleagues in other disciplines and officials at the U.S Department of Education, strongly believe that testing must be implemented in such a way as to improve the total school experience, rather than in a way that effectively narrows educational opportunities for students. Second of all, music educators face the challenge of using assessment in their own programs in order to inform theirteaching as well as benefit the students in their classroom.
Additionally, music educators have historically used multiple forms of assessment for their students, reported on students’ musical progress to parents, and implemented sophisticated systems for the evaluation of school performing ensembles to establish publicly accessible quality measures in certain aspects of their programs. However, I think that they face multiple unique challenges as they seek to expand their assessment work. For one, music teachers are often responsible for teaching and assessing large numbers of students, such as in ensemble classes or across a weeklong schedule of elementary general music students, in addition to the fact that most important assessable work in music classes consists of multimedia products, such as performances and improvisations which must be recorded and scored individually. Ideally, I think schools should and would greatly benefit from balancing large ensemble rehearsals with small group lessons and provide recording devices and other technology to facilitate the collection, management, and scoring of students’ individual music work.
Technology (audio/video recording, SmartMusic, etc.) can be a big help to music educators as they assist students. Also, making assessment part of the instructional process is a strategy to use when managing the assessment of large numbers of students. An article that is in your coursepack to read - Embedding Assessment in Choral Teaching - has some good ideas regarding that approach.
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