Hello! I'm Glenn Nierman, Steinhart Professor of Music Education at the University of Nebraska Lincoln's
Glenn Korff School of Music, and I'm also President-elect of the National Association for Music
Education. You, as pre-service music educators are about to
enter the profession at a very exciting time. We're on the
cusp of some real breakthroughs nationally, particularly in our advocacy
efforts to have recognized music as part of the core
curriculum. Further, we're about to introduce a revised version of
our national music standards. For at least two decades now,
we've been on a journey to help students acquire the
knowledge and the skills necessary to participate authentically in the arts
for a lifetime. The 1994 music standards
emphasized what every student should know and be able to
do: products. Now, with the revised
standards, we will emphasize a process-oriented nature of
music and music-learning. My purpose today
is to help us to understand the role of
measurement and assessment in a revised standards environment, and secondly,
to preview what some assessment tasks call
cornerstone assessments might look like in this environment.
Most of you were probably evaluated using
a model that progressed something like this: your teacher wrote objectives
and a lesson plan, and then they taught to that
particular content. They identified the skills and the knowledge
that you should have. Then, they gave you some time to practice the
skill or to learn the content, and then they tested you
on that content. The revised standards are based on a new
model for teaching that turns the process around
and asks the teacher to begin thinking about the test first.
Actually, we hope you'll be thinking about assessing student growth using
a series of authentic musical tasks rather than just one test.
A little more on that later. A backwards design
framework based on the book "Understanding by Designs" by McTighe
and Wiggins from 2005 was selected in our
revised national standards model to assist educators in first determining
acceptable evidence of attainment, and then designing the best
path for achieving those desired results.
Actually, that's not quite right either. We don't want to think
just about the test. Did you ever wonder why we hear
less and less about tests and measurement and more and more about assessing
and assessment? Well, that's because a test is simply a measurement
device, a way of gathering information. I can write
a sixteen measure melody that contains some rhythms and articulations we've been
singing or playing in band, chorus, or orchestra in the music we've been
rehearsing. That then will test your mastery of certain
rhythms and articulations. Assessment is a much broader
process than that. It draws on measurements and
other tasks to determine if growth, and that word growth is key, is
taking place in the individual. By the way, determining if growth
is taking place in the learner has become a very important
element in teacher evaluation now: termed value added
assessment. Currently, I've been working with a team of
individuals from across the country to design sample cornerstone
assessment tasks that will eventually be a part of the revised standard
content. I want to emphasize that the example I'm about to show you is simply
a draft at this point, but it will serve us well in terms of understanding
some of the ways in which cornerstone assessments are
different from traditional tests. Here's a sample of a cornerstone
assessment. The draft performance standard would go something like this
:using pieces currently rehearsed by an ensemble, students will
select a work that enables multiple expressive interpretations;
identify expressive performance challenges, set expressive
performance goals, document processes of addressing the challenges,
and accomplishment attained; and complete an evaluation comparing observations from
two points in time.
Now, you will note that this is a very
different sort of measurement from
the sixteen measure rhythm and articulation test that I described earlier.
I'd like to now point out some of the characteristics
of corner stone assessments embedded in this draft sample, and
so doing so I think I have a better understanding of what a corner stone assessment task really is.
The opening portion of this particular
corner stone assessment says, "Using pieces currently rehearsed
by an ensemble," so in other words, the
material for this assessment is going to be drawn from
the curriculum and things that were embedded in the curriculum itself
It's not an extra test that the teacher devised
after the fact. Secondly, if we read on, "students
will select a work," it's not the teacher selecting
the task, but the students themselves are going to select from
the pieces or songs they've been rehearsing.
we move down a little bit further, we'll notice that where I have the number three there
that we're going to set some expressive performance goals, and
document the processes of addressing the challenges
that they find. So there again you see that emphasis on the word process
rather than product at the end. It's not just whether you can sing or play this correctly
but it has to do with what kinds of
processes did you use in order to
obtain that particular goal. Finally,
near the end of the description of the assessment task, you will see that
the student is to "complete an evaluation
comparing observations from two points in time," and
that is very key here because now we see the importance of growth.
We're going tot see what the student is able to do
with respect to this particular piece at the beginning, then there's some time to practice,
identify the challenges, and so forth, and then for the student
to sing or play this piece again. So you have these
to sing or play this piece again. So you have these comparisons, and we're looking
process where by they got ot the final goal of
this particular performance. Alright, so
I think you can see that assesment as changed quite a bit. It's not just about
constructing tests anymore. Imagine the fun your students are going to have being engaged.
in authentic musical tasks, and also imagine the pride that you're going to feel
as a music educator being able to document the musical growth that has take place
in the students in your classroom. Here are some characteristics to help us
understand better this concept of corner stone assessments which again comes from
McTighe and Wiggens' book "Understanding by
Design." First of all, cornerstone assessments are embedded in the
curriculum. They are drawn from the task that
you are working on everyday within the rehearsal or in
the classroom. The second characteristic is that these
cornerstone assessments recur over the grades, in terms of ever
increasing spirals of complexity. So
a performer in the fifth grade who has just picked up their violin or their new instrument
is going to have the same time of task, but it will take
place with much less
detail with respect to the kinds of things that the student will be asked to do.
A third characteristic of cornerstone assessments is that they occur
in authentic contexts. By this we mean it's not
just filling in the blank of a bubble sheet, but the students are actually
playing or singing the music that they have been rehearsing.
Another characteristic of understanding and
transfer. It's not enough just to repeat
in a rote learning sort of way what the student has learned
and demonstrate that they can remember it to the teacher. Can they transfer
it to another situation which is similar?
Another characteristic of cornerstone assessment involves the
integration of 21st century skills. We hear a lot about these skills:
critical thinking, technology use, teamwork. All
of these kinds of 21st century skills should be integrated
with demonstrating music knowledge and skills in a
cornerstone assessment. Another characteristic involves
the evaluation of the performance with
established rubrics. This takes a bit of time, of course, to delineate
the various levels of attainment in the rubric
but it helps the student understand, in a holistic type of way, the kinds of
things that they are doing with the task as a whole.
Another characteristic involves engaging students in meaningful learning.
Again, this is not just a fill in the blank, is this a quarter note? Is this the correct
rhythm and so forth? The students are actually engaged in
making music, so the learning is indeed meaningful.
A final characteristic that McTighe points out has to do with providing
content for student portfolios. Often we're asked to document,
particularly again this idea of growth, and when we have
recordings of students performing, first
at the beginning and then working with some instruction, and then another
performance in time, we begin to collect, with videos and
so forth, a good set of information that can
be used in student portfolios.