Planning an Arts Education Assessment System in Your District

Nancy Pistone in Envisioning Arts Assessment (2002) identified steps for a school district to take to create an arts assessment system. Building on these steps, guiding points have been provided to assist you in thinking through important questions.

1.    Assemble a planning committee.

Consider which stakeholders need to be included. Arts specialists, classroom teachers, administrators, district assessment staff, parents, and community artists are all constituents who can provide valuable input and guidance in the assessment process. Learn what other districts are doing to assess the arts in their curriculum. Maximize your planning process by drawing on the successes and lessons learned by other districts.

Consider conducting a needs assessment. What are the perceptions and needs for assessment in the arts? A needs assessment will allow the planning committee the opportunity to survey existing assessment and determine the attitudes and understandings of the many stakeholders.

2.    Be clear about what you want to accomplish with assessment in the arts.

What are your goals and objectives? Assessment can identify student accomplishment, contribute to classroom instruction, and provide data for district accountability. The committee should be clear on the priorities the assessment will address. Consider the following points in your planning process.

Articulate what students should be able to know and do in the arts at each grade level. This is done by connecting assessment to standards and instruction. What do the California Visual and Performing Arts standards tell us about what students should know and do in the arts? The state standards are key to good assessment. Good assessment is strongly tied to standards and instruction; they are interrelated and they inform each other. The Maryland State Department of Education provides a clear graphic illustration about the relationship between standards, instruction, and assessment. 

The Connecticut State Department of Education has a guide on how to use state standards in building assessment plans. 
   
San Diego City Schools has created curriculum maps based on the state standards for all of the arts for kindergarten, first, and second grades. These maps outline the curriculum goals for the school year and make for a solid foundation for developing an accompanying assessment component.  
 

• Establish assessment criteria. What criteria will you use in assessing students? Will your criteria focus on the process of learning about and making art or will it focus on students’ resulting artworks? Or both?
• Develop assessment procedures that will identify skills, knowledge, and outcomes. Strive to make these assessment procedures as authentic as possible.

3.    Establish parameters for your assessment system.

There are many specifics of your assessment system that need to be determined in your planning process. Here are some to start with. 

• Designate individuals or teams to develop the assessment. There are many aspects of assessment development. Because arts assessment is a developing area, it is important to remember validity and reliability when developing quantitative measures. Validity tells you if your assessment is actually measuring what you want it to measure. Reliability ensures that the assessment is consistent. For example, a reliable assessment gets the same results regardless of whether it is administered before or after lunch. 
• Clarify which grade levels will be assessed. Many assessment processes begin with one or a few grade levels and add more as the process is refined.
• Provide professional development to district arts specialists, classroom teachers, administrators, and/or artists to implement the assessments.
• Determine how the assessment will be carried out and by whom. 
• Identify from whom assessment information be collected (students, teachers, artists).
• Assign the task of collecting assessment information.
• Determine the schedule for this collection.
• Clarify who will be interpreting the assessment information.
• Decide on a dissemination plan for the assessment results to be shared with the stakeholders.

4.   Create a timeline for implementation. 

Assessment systems take time to develop and implement. A feasible timeline should allow for development, testing, and revision of the assessment process and tools. The following guiding points are for use and reflection during implementation of your assessment.

• Review how the assessments are being implemented.
• Examine how assessment is informing instruction.
• Look at how assessment results are being shared with students, other teachers, school and district administrators, families, and the community at large.
• Determine if the stakeholders understand the assessment to be fair and accurate.
• Analyze how the assessment process is adapted and revised as needed.

Allowing time for development and evaluation of the assessment is a critical component of the process. One Washington school district is introducing districtwide assessment over several years. Seattle Public Schools began implementing their districtwide classroom-based performance assessment in the 2008/09 school year. In the 2007/08 school year certified arts teachers were encouraged to try out the new assessment. Reporting was not required, so teachers did not have to score the assessment. Rather, teachers were encouraged to use this assessment tool to understand how it works and what it offers. This “toe in the water” was preceded by professional development that introduced the assessment tool and process.   

For the 2008/09 school year, each certified arts teacher will use the new assessment with one class of students in fifth, eighth, or tenth grades. Scoring will be required as the district will be reporting results to the state of Washington. This next step will be accompanied by further professional development on scoring and scoring consistency. 

Seattle Public Schools is hoping to use the new assessment over the next few years to (a) identify the crucial key concepts that need to be taught in every art form at every grade level; (b) inform the scope and sequence of instruction in the arts; and (c) strategically use district resources to fill in identified gaps.