Alternative Assessment Techniques for Teachers

Abstract

Are you at a loss for ways to assess your music students? Mitchell Robinson offers some ideas that might help you improve your situation. B hil came home well after 6:00 P.M. feeling more tired and frustrated than he had all year. There had been the conversation with the principal, the three angry phone calls from parents of kids in his band, and then, at the very end of the day, his best trumpet player and set drummer told him they were dropping his class from their second-quarter schedules. All of this occurred as a direct result of the grades Phil had posted that morning after being up until 2:00 A.M. hastily "bubbling-in" numerical grades on the computer-generated forms that the school had adopted only the previous semester.Phil knew he should have kept better records on his students during the term. One of his recurring nightmares involved being called on the carpet over a poor grade and not having any tangible evidence to justify the mark he gave. He always felt a twinge of guilt at report-card time as he eyeballed his students' names: "I think an 85 for Tim should do; he does a pretty good job on the bass clarinet and Mitchell Robinson is a doctoral candidate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NewYork. An active clinician and guest conductor, he served for ten years as director of bands and as music department facilitator in the public schools of Fulton, New York.Measuring student performance is part of every music educator's job. MUSICEDUCATORS JOURNAL 28 MARCH 1995 29

The Inchworm and the Nightingale: On the (Mis)use of Data in Music Teacher Evaluation

“…And yet, too many school leaders fail to understand the authenticity of these forms of assessment to capture the true essence of student learning (Robinson 1995). Far from being "afraid" of accountability, music educators, I would suggest, should be recognized as the true pioneers of accountability by virtue of the public nature of their enterprise as performers and teachers.…”

La evaluación de las actividades musicales

“…El problema es que las distancias entre cada uno de los grados no son idénticas. Al final, según establece Robinson (1995), se corre el peligro de caer en lo subjetivo.…”

“…Una de las desventajas de este modelo que sugerimos radica en los coeficientes de evaluación asignados a cada item y a cada uno de los cuatro niveles de valoración de cada uno de ellos, ya que como afirma Robinson (1995) "la distancia entre los distintos niveles no es a menudo igual". Creemos que la forma de paliar este problema es que el evaluador clarifique sus objetivos y los priorice con el fin de poder asignar un coeficiente numérico lo más aproximado posible a sus convicciones que aunque subjetivas estén meditadas y fundamentadas.…”

Development of the Processfolio: Promoting Preservice Music Teacher Reflection Through Authentic Assessment

“…In its most basic sense, a portfolio is a meaningful collection of student effort, progress, and achievement, with purposeful selection of material and deliberative student self-reflection (Lyons, 1998; Paulson, Paulson, & Meyer, 1991). There are four general portfolio categories (Robinson, 1995): (a) presentation/product portfolios that include student work of the highest quality, (b) product/performance portfolios that allow for comparison of the same samples of work across students, (c) program portfolios that function as a form of program evaluation by presenting exemplars of student work within a particular program, and (d) process portfolios that provide a collection of student products gathered at various stages of development. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the portfolio as a means for teacher evaluation and professional development (e.g., Berrill & Addison, 2010; Learning Point, 2010; Tennessee Department of Education, 2012), as a graduation requirement (e.g., Lynch & Purnawarman, 2004), as well as teacher certification (Parkes & Powell, 2015) in general education, and in music education specifically.…”