Assessment in the Orchestra Classroom
I would venture to say that all teachers assess their students in some way or another. As music educators, I feel as if assessment comes hand in hand with what we do. We teach students a concept, skill, scale, fingering, or piece of music and then we practice it, check for understanding, and ultimately, perform it. Great musicians are masters at assessing their progress and mapping out how they are going to move along and learn a piece of music or new idea.
For a musician, assessment is part of the natural process of improving. For example, a musician knows they must learn a piece of music by the concert date. That is their end goal. They are to learn the piece and all that is involved in the music. Throughout the study of that piece, a great musician will constantly assess their progress, identify areas that need work, acting as a doctor by prescribing remedies for fixing the challenges and difficulties within a piece of music. A musician will diagnose issues and come up with solutions on how to solve the difficulties of the piece. They will solve these problems or challenges in the music through exercises and through repetition and practice. They will then assess, after that time of practice, how they are doing, what more do they need to do, and continue to make assessments as they work on a piece. The performance is the final test, the summative assessment, if you will. The performance demonstrates how much the musician has mastered and what else needs improvement.
As I stated earlier, great music teachers will do the same with their students. As music educators, we pass out a piece of music, practice it with our students, diagnose problems, create ways to help them improve, assess and check our students progress, and continue to assess the progress of the piece, until it is mastered. A process of formative and summative assessments.
Formative and Summative Assessment
The goal of assessment is to help teachers and students monitor progress and work toward a common learning goal. Educational practices today encourage teachers to administer assessments as either formative assessments or summative assessments. We will discuss both forms of assessment mentioned.
Formative assessments and summative assessments are different in nature, but they work together. Formative assessments are to be given during an instructional period and are to help both the teacher and student gauge what they do or do not know about the subject matter. In other words, formative assessment are used to gather data on our students and get a more specific picture on how an individual child is doing. These types of assessments are to ultimately inform and guide classroom or individual instruction. Formative assessments do not count toward a grade, but give instant feedback and check for student understanding and growth.
In contrast, summative assessments are done at the end of a unit of study. These types of assessments are to demonstrate what a student knows and has learned at the completion of a unit of study. These types of assessments are most commonly graded.
Either type of assessment can be done more formally or informally during a period of instruction. Some examples of formative assessments in a music classroom might be questions to the class during a classroom discussion, a short quiz, a classroom writing assignment, sectional work where you monitor student progress, one-on-one lesson work, an exit question at the end of a lesson, or having each student play a short excerpt solo or in a small group after instruction is given. Summative assessment might include a written test, a final playing exam, final essay, a performance recording, or graded final performance of a piece.
Why Should Teachers Assess? How Does Assessment Benefit Students?
Assessment is important for gaining valuable information about our students and what they do or don’t know. In other words, evaluating a student’s knowledge can help us as educators come up with more student focused and goal oriented instruction. Assessment should be done often and continually throughout a unit so that we as educators are truly gauging student learning and student understanding.
Assessments Tools In The Orchestra Classroom
Assessment should focus on the skills and concepts we want our students to master. Therefore, when devising formative or summative assessments it’s helpful to create a rubric specific to that assignment. The rubric should evaluate a number of criteria and should be based on concrete objectives and have varying levels for student achievement.
For example, consider a summative assessment of your students concert music. During concert preparation time, I have had my students prepare assigned excerpts from their music and then record and submit their performances of those excerpts via our online music classroom through Smart Music. I then used a rubric that I created to assess each students performance. When listening to each student’s performance I was assessing each recording on tone production, intonation, rhythmic accuracy, and expressiveness. Based on those criteria, I grade my students on a 4 point scale of achievement. A “4” indicates they have performed the excerpt with no mistakes and have demonstrated the skill at a “mastery” level. A “3” means the student may have demonstrated the concept with a few errors and is at an “applying” level and so on.
I also like to give etudes, bowing studies, rhythm studies, and scales and assess those throughout the year. The assessment criteria for each of these types of assignments changes based on the specific assignment and what I want to assess.
Written tests and written assignments are valuable, but may only measure one type of knowledge. For example, asking a student to identify a dynamic marking in a piece of music is valuable, but having a student perform a dynamic marking truly shows he or she understands the marking. Since orchestra is a performance class, it is good for a student to be able to define piano, but even more powerful and a clear demonstration of knowledge when a student can perform at a piano marking. This type of demonstration of knowledge shows the student has really learned the concept!
What Concepts Should String Educators Assess?
When devising assessments, we as educators, should always strive for our assessments to be relevant and focused on the specific content and skills students have been working on and based on what we want our students to know. The Music Educators National Conference has some helpful ideas for music educators to keep in mind when creating assessments. It’s also important to note that assessment and instruction should meet state and national standards. MENC writes that:
- Assessment should be standards based and should reflect the music skills and knowledge that are most important for students to learn.
- Assessment should support, enhance, and reinforce learning
- Assessment should be reliable
- Assessment should be valid
- Assessment should be authentic
- The process of assessment should be open to review by interested parties
Assessments should also strive to engage our students in higher level thinking processes and should demonstrate an application of the concepts learned in a unit or course of study. True, higher level thinking and understanding has happened when students are able to demonstrate the skills we have taught them independently. I have always thought that if a student can create something new with the concepts we have taught them, they have truly mastered the concept and are working at a higher level. For example, if you teach a G major scale, it’s great for a student to play a G major scale, but the student truly shows mastery when they can create a composition using the G major scale, right?
So, what do I assess? Here are some ideas:
- Playing assignments that focus on a specific excerpt from a piece or etude
- Written assessments that addresses concepts taught in a piece (dynamics, articulations, road maps, key signatures, rhythmic analysis)
- Scale tests that demonstrate students knowledge of fingerings, notes, and keys.
- Musical concepts and key vocabulary
- Bowings and execution of bowings
- Bow tone and sound production (WASP = Weight, Angle, Speed, and Placement of the bow)
- Bowing definitions and string specific concepts
- Compositions that demonstrate the students using a scale that was studied in class, a rhythm, or musical concept.
Conclusion
Assessment is such an important aspect of teaching and something that seems to come naturally to musicians. The challenge may be in being structured and intentional about consistently assessing student progress and knowledge. It’s certainly an area I think about often and am constantly growing in. I hope some of these ideas and concepts may help spur some assessment tools and strategies in your orchestra.
References
- https://ctl.yale.edu/Formative-Summative-Assessments
- https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1182&context=oa_theses
- https://nafme.org/about/history/menc-centennial/a-centennial-declaration-of-menc-the-national-association-for-music-education/