Assessing knowledge, skill, and understanding is a crucial component of a sequential and comprehensive arts education. This section provides a brief overview of arts assessment with links to teacher projects that illustrate key concepts. In addition, resources for further learning in arts assessment are included.

Quality Arts Assessment

There are a number of qualities that should be present in arts education assessment. Dennie Palmer Wolf and Nancy Pistone, in their book Taking Full Measure: Rethinking Assessment Through the Arts, identified the following qualities for arts education assessment.

An Insistence on Excellence
Expectations for student work should be high and clearly communicated.

Judgment
Artwork should elicit a variety of responses.

Importance of Self-Assessment
Artists engage in self-assessment of their work. Student artists should also be actively engaged in this process.

Multiple Forms of Assessment
Using multiple forms of assessment captures nuances that are missed with only one approach. Each assessment tool provides a new piece of information and insight and broadens our understanding of students’ learning and work.

Ongoing Assessment
Assessment should be embedded into the learning process and ongoing throughout the school year (rather than occurring at only one point in the calendar). Student artists benefit greatly from the circular process of creation, analysis, and revision.

“Doing” and “making” are critical components of arts education. Arts knowledge is assessable and so is the process of making art as well as the artwork itself. Each of these components – knowledge, process, and production – is intertwined, and each needs to be represented and accounted for in assessment.

Arts education assessment is authentic. In other words, it examines students’ work much like “real world” work is assessed. While pencil-and-paper testing may have a role, much of arts assessment is based on more complex and in-depth examinations of student work. Strategies that accomplish authentic assessment include portfolios, personal reflection, and critique.

Arts education makes great use of authentic assessment when students are creating their own artworks. Grant Wiggins (1998) identified the following standards for authentic assessment.

1. The assessment task is much like one found in a real-world setting. Edward Warburton (2002) encourages those using authentic assessment to not be limited to or focus solely on the final product or outcome. Warburton states that assessment in context includes not only genuine final products but it also includes activities that are true to the making of the art form. He points out that playing scales on a piano is not an authentic product but it is an authentic task in the musical training of pianists. So assessment in context includes both final products such as portfolios or performances as well as “traditional pedagogical activities” such as playing scales or warm-up exercises.

2. The assessment requires judgment and innovation. Students must create their own solutions to problems rather than using only formulas or established procedures.

3. The assessment asks students to “do” the subject. Rather than regurgitating facts, students must conduct the work of the content area. They must know and do.

4. Students must use skills and knowledge to complete complex tasks. Authentic assessment requires students to integrate skill and knowledge – often from more than one content area – to solve problems and create solutions.

5. The assessment allows students to practice, get feedback, and revise performances and products. Authentic assessments utilize the circular loop of performance, feedback, and revision. Student work develops and evolves through this use of assessment.