In the last two or three months, news items have appeared around the country that question the use of standardized tests, for example, from admission placement to Kindergarten in New York city (ABC News VIDEO) to a national conference on a new study of the effects of using the SAT for college admission (New York Times). The Dean of Harvard Admissions stated at the conference:

At Harvard we get terrific students, and we turn out terrific students later on, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. Is that due to Harvard or is that due to the students to begin with? Who knows? There are fabulous institutions with relatively low test-score averages that are absolutely first rate, that take students from point A to point Z." He continued, Educational quality has nothing to do, or very little to do, with actual average SAT scores.(NYTimes, 9/29/08):

The theme that continues to come up across the nation is imprecise measurement of student skills. In assessment language, imprecise measurement means that there is something the tests measure reasonably well, but that imprecision, or lack of real validity or reliability of the tests is a rising concern. Although this imprecision has been well known throughout the testing community, the public is just beginning to join this conversation, and is just beginning to look around for non-standardized assessments that show student achievement.

Digital portfolios: An online collection of student work that exhibits evidence of student progress.

The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc., supports the use of alternative forms of assessment, such as portfolios of student work, that are usually discarded as measures of student achievement because they do not boil a student down into a number. However, alternative forms of assessment may be more revealing and may turn out to be a better predictor of student success, if admissions officers were able to access them in digital form. The potential use of digital portfolios that follow the student from grade to grade and from school to school and finally to college could be one of the most innovative and insightful ways for students to archive, display, and ultimately prove their acheivement.

• For teaching artist residencies
• For classes
• For performances
• For after-school programs
• For workshops
• Post-program written test

• For use during residency
• For post-residency grading
• For residency follow-up

• For performances
• For teaching artist residencies
• For workshops

• For guest artist observation

• For classes
• For school programs

Arts Education includes Music, Visual Arts, Dance and Theatre.

The Arts Education Partnership is committed to increasing resources for quality education in and through the arts in schools, schools districts and partnering arts and cultural institutions. The evaluation resources posted on this web site will be updated periodically.

If your organization would like AEP to link to a research or evaluation report, please download the Guideline Form and fax to the attention of Program Assistant at (202) 408-8081. If approved, the report will be posted within two weeks. If you have any questions send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Envisioning Arts Assessment
A guide to help design large- Scale art assessment decisions. Also provides informational support and activities to be used as both a practical tool and reference. To order copies of this publication visit the Publications page.

Maryland Assessment of Fine Arts Education: State of the Art in Large-Scale Fine Arts Assessment
These pages present a chart highlighting the essential characteristics of large-scale assessments in the fine arts for both states with a mandated requirement for such assessments and those states that have no mandated requirement but engage in various assessments and activities in fine arts education.

The NAEP 1997 Arts Report Card: Eighth Grade Findings From the National Assessment of Educational Progress
In 1997, NAEP administered an arts assessment to approximately 6,480 students at grade 8 throughout the U.S. The national sample assessed 268 schools, measuring students' knowledge and skills in music, theatre, and visual arts. Dance was field tested in grades 4 and 8 in 1995, in grade 12 in 1997, along with music, theatre, and visual arts. The next NAEP arts assessment is planned for 2007.

Summary of Large-Scale Arts Partnership Evaluations
The Arts Education Partnership first hosted presentations on the progress of these large-scale evaluations at its June 2000 meeting in Durham, North Carolina. Since that meeting, each of 7 the projects has released various reports and studies. An overview of these more recent findings was presented at the June 23, 2003 meeting of the Arts Education Partnership. To read the June 23, 2003 meeting report link into the About the Partnership section.

Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge (TETAC)
The TETAC project was initiated by the National Arts Education Consortium, or NAEC, which comprised six regional organizations in six states California, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas. Since 1987, these organizations have worked collectively developing, testing and refining Professional Development and curriculum Implementation programs to advance a comprehensive approach to arts education in the nation’s public schools. Please note, AEP does not distribute hard copies of this report.

Council of Chief State School Officers
One Massachusetts Avenue, NW · Suite 700
Washington, DC 20001-1431
voice: 202.336.7000 · fax: 202.408.8072

Legal Conditions · This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it · Sitemap

More About NAEP Arts

The NAEP arts assessment presents a broad view of how well America's students can respond to, create, and perform works of visual art, music, and theatre. Although an assessment was developed for dance, it was not administered due to the lack of a suitable national sample. However, dance was field tested in grades 4 and 8 in 1995, in grade 12 in 1997, along with music, theater, and visual arts.

The assessment was developed by a committee of arts and measurement experts to capture the goals of the NAEP Arts Education Assessment Framework. The framework, which describes the goals of the assessment and what kinds of exercises it ought to feature, was created by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) through a comprehensive, national process involving teachers and researchers of the arts, measurement experts, policymakers, and members of the general public.

According to the framework, at its best, the teaching of the arts will emphasize creating and performing works of art as well as studying and analyzing existing works. Thus, meaningful assessments should be built around three arts processes—creating, performing, and responding.

• Creating refers to expressing ideas and feelings in the form of an original work of art, for example, a dance, a piece of music, a dramatic improvisation, or a sculpture.
• Performing refers to performing an existing work, a process that calls upon the interpretive or re-creative skills of the student.
• Responding refers to observing, describing, analyzing, and evaluating works of art.

In order to capture the processes of creating, performing, and responding, the arts assessment consisted of the following types of exercises at grade 8 (the assessment was only administered at grade 8 due to budget constraints):

• Authentic tasks that assessed students' knowledge and skills in creating and performing in the visual arts, music and theatre. Among other activities, students were asked to sing, create music, create and perform dances, and create works of visual art using various media. Students were also asked to evaluate their own work in written form.
• Constructed-response and multiple-choice questions that explored students' abilities to describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate works of art in written form.

Look at a more detailed distribution of questions by item format.

NAEP also gives background questionnaires to teachers, students, and schools that are part of the NAEP sample. Responses to these questionnaires give NAEP information about how teachers teach dance, music, theatre, and visual arts, what kinds of arts learning students experience in schools, and what kinds of opportunities for arts education are made available by schools.

Learn more about NAEP, the nation's only ongoing assessment of what students know and can do in various subject areas.

View the NAEP 1997 Arts Report Card.

In everyday life we usually try to get the facts before we make a decision.  The greater the amount of accurate information we can gather, the more confident we can be that we are making the right decision.  The same thing holds true in the classroom when we assess students to get information that's used to decide what they know and can do, to diagnose their needs, to decide if we need to teach something in a different way, to plan instruction, to assign grades, to communicate with parents, and to guide us in the development of School Improvement plans.  The consequences of making a poor decision can be very serious, so it's important to make sure that we're basing our decisions on an adequate amount of sound information.  Or to put it another way we need assessment results that are both reliable and valid for our particular purpose.

Because a Performance Assessment does not have an answer key in the sense that a multiple choice test does, scoring a performance assessment necessarily involves making some subjective judgments about the quality of a student's work.  Many people feel uncomfortable with making and using subjective judgments and find that a good set of scoring guidelines or "rubric" provides a way to make those judgments fair and sound.  It does so by setting forth a uniform set of precisely defined criteria or guidelines that will be used to judge student work.

The rubric should organize and clarify the scoring criteria well enough so that two teachers who apply the rubric to a student's work will generally arrive at the same score.  The degree of agreement between the scores assigned by two independent scorers is a measure of the reliability of an assessment.  This type of consistency is needed for a performance assessment to yield good data that can be meaningfully combined across classrooms and used to develop School Improvement plans.

A good scoring rubric will:

• Help teachers define excellence and plan how to help students achieve it.
• Communicate to students what constitutes excellence and how to evaluate their own work.
• Communicate goals and results to parents and others.
• Help teachers or other raters be accurate, unbiased and consistent in scoring.
• Document the procedures used in making important judgments about students.
  

(Herman, Aschbacher, and Winters, 1992)

A performance assessment consists of two parts, a task and a set of scoring criteria or "rubric."  The task may be a product, performance or extended written response to a question that requires the student to apply Critical Thinking skills.  Some examples of performance assessment tasks include written compositions, speeches, works of art, science fair projects, research projects, musical performances, open-ended math problems, and analysis and interpretation of a story the student has read.  (See Assessment Tasks for more examples of performance tasks and criteria for selecting performance tasks.)  Existing classroom instructional activities may often be transformed into a performance assessment with the addition of suitable scoring criteria.