Grading in the Ensemble Classroom

This chapter is an application of grading fundamentals to the ensemble music setting. Music grades have evolved to include many conventions that do not conform to the advice of many grading experts. Grades determined by student achievement with respect to foundational understandings and abilities, rather than concert music performance, are often the fairest and most educational. Areas of particular concern for music grades include home practice time, concert and rehearsal attendance, class participation, and extra credit. These and other issues are elucidated. Recommendations for educative music grades are included throughout.

Concert Preparation

This chapter provides assessment strategies for performance preparation assessment. Even though performing is a central and necessary aspect of ensemble music classes, concerts are not themselves assessment of individual students’ musical learning. The chapter includes a variety of ways to implement assessment in the rehearsal. Both informal assessment during the course of a traditional rehearsal and formal assessment settings off the podium can improve performance results. Self and peer assessment build metacognitive musicians and provide pathways to individualized feedback that teachers may have missed. Infusing assessment into the ensemble rehearsal is an investment of class time that pays noticeable dividends.

Why Assessment?

This chapter explains foundations underpinning assessment in ensembles. Music educators need information about what their students know and are able to do in order to do their best teaching. However, such information is hard to obtain using traditional ensemble methods. Individual classroom assessment yields more information about student performance than standardized testing or regular rehearsals. Concepts such as metacognition, the Zone of Proximal Development, self-efficacy, social-emotional learning, and growth mindset can be productively incorporated into the design and use of assessments. Assessment alters the curriculum as tested topics are emphasized, and runs the risk of reductionism. Still, classroom assessment has untapped power to transform ensemble music education.

Gathering Information

This chapter details many ways of collecting information about student performance. Diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment all work together to inform teaching and learning throughout a lesson or unit. Summative assessment is what comes to mind when many people think of “assessment,” but summative assessment is the assessment type that supports learning the least. Assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, is the type of classroom assessment that helps students know where they are going, where they are now, and how to get there. Assessment design can improve validity. A nearly infinite variety of possible assessment methods, or ways to gather information, exists. The most common methods in schools can be categorized as selected response, written response, verbal response, performance or demonstration, personal communication, portfolios, quick formative assessment techniques, and self and peer assessment. Using a variety of methods helps to ensure curricular comprehensiveness.

Assessment and Curriculum

This chapter addresses how curriculum can be explained to students in order to facilitate assessment. Many educators are familiar with curricular terminology like standards and outcomes, but traditional curriculum writing has focused more on teachers than on students. Learning targets are a particular type of student outcome that emphasizes ease of comprehension by students. Learning targets can be classified as knowledge, reasoning, skills, products, or dispositions. Classroom assessment is more effective when both teacher and students have clarity about what will be assessed, how it will be assessed, and what suffices as evidence of mastery.

Grading Basics

This chapter will provide music educators with a deeper understanding of the grading process. Some elements of grades and grading are immediately apparent, while others lurk powerfully below the surface. Grades are to function as communication about student achievement. However, the often-arbitrary nature of grading policies and calculations means that their communicative function is less effective. Grades can facilitate learning in addition to their reporting function. Standards-Based Grading is an approach that emphasizes student achievement in grades, and the exclusion of nonacademic information such as timely assignment completion, attendance, and effort. Various grading procedures are discussed.

Beginning Your Own Journey

This chapter offers teachers advice on how to begin using more assessment in their teaching. A sequence of Plan, Prepare, Teach, Reflect can help teachers gradually expand their assessment repertoire. Instructional technology is discussed generally, with selected recommendations for specific platforms. Starting small and gradually adding new methods and topics is more likely to result in sustained improvement than attempts to change everything all at once.

Fundamental Skills

This chapter includes strategies for assessing music students’ foundational performance abilities. Skills including tone, technique, posture, hand position, stage presence, and music literacy are considered. Numerous examples are provided for all performance areas; orchestra, choir, and band each have their own dedicated section of this chapter.

Musical Understandings

This chapter addresses assessment of students as musical learners, rather than merely as performers. Ensemble music teachers often conceive of each class as a rehearsal, the focus of which is to improve the group’s performance of concert repertoire. The assumption is that individual skills will inherently improve in this paradigm, but too often the resulting individual skills are uneven or lacking. Individual instruction and assessment of musical foundations is a path to better ensembles. Students can build musical independence through deepening their knowledge base and assisting with interpretation. Improving their ability to critique musical performances facilitates other self and peer assessment activities. Assessment of knowledge, reasoning, creative products, and dispositions facilitates transfer and students’ ability to understand what they are performing and why they are performing it.

Evaluation and Feedback

This chapter includes strategies for evaluating assessment information after it has been collected, and providing useful feedback to students. Using criterion referencing, rather than norm referencing, is the best choice for classroom assessment. Assessments with many levels are less reliable; usually, three or four levels is a good choice. Descriptive feedback, which is focused on student improvement, is more educative than evaluative feedback, which does not always provide students with the information they need. Design of evaluation methods like rubrics, rating scales, checklists, and narratives can facilitate all steps in the assessment process. Evaluation that casts musical elements as unrelated is often problematic and reductionist, as is assessment that attempts to use the same criteria for many possible artistic situations. Assessment design can attenuate these difficulties as well. Even though educational data is often overused and misused, it can still inform teachers’ instruction when thoughtfully and judiciously acquired and analysed.