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SC ARTS – TEACHING ARTS IN THE ELEMENTARY GRADE MODULE

LESSON 8
Rethinking and Formative Assessment

Learning Outcome
 Define rethinking and formative assessment
 Determine its purpose and how can it be a powerful tool
 Identify its application to the arts assessment

Introduction
Assessment of art requires a valid and comprehensive type of evaluation. This lesson will help us
identify the different ways on how to easily assess arts in the Elementary grade. Aside from the usual
summative assessment being done, we will able to determine other type of assessment and how can it
be a powerful tool.

Lesson Content/Lecture Notes

What is Assessment?
Defining Assessment
- the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document
the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students
- the process of describing, collecting, recording, scoring and interpreting information about
learning
Types of Assessment
There are more, but for our purposes today we’ll talk about two.
Rethinking Assessment
Rethinking assessment with purpose in mind is intended to provide a framework for extending
thinking to confirm and to guide changes in effective assessment practices and to foster professional
learning. Teachers can reflect on, discuss and try out in classrooms. When assessment is designed with
purpose in mind, learning for all students can improve. Rethinking assessment highlight the importance
of the self-monitoring processes students use during learning, which have great potential to empower
learners and foster ongoing learning.
Classroom assessment plays a major role in how the students learn, their motivation to lean,
and how the teachers teach. Teachers can use many different strategies and tools for classroom
assessment, and can adopt them to suit the purpose and the needs of individual student. The goal is for
students to learn, when learning is the goal, teachers and students collaborate and use ongoing
assessments and pertinent feedback to move learning forward.

Formative Assessment
Formative assessment carried out during the instructional process for the purpose of “near-
immediate” improvement of teaching and learning. It is more a process than a thing. It is a
measurement for learning.

Different times for formative assessment

• Before instruction
At the beginning of a unit (or even year/when students arrive) to understand what
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Lungsod ng Batangas
Colegio ng Lungsod ng Batangas
Contact No. (043) 402-1450

students already know/can do and are interested in.

Examples:
- Think, Puzzle, Explore routine on a topic (to understand not only what students might already
know but also what they are curious and interested in related to a topic)
- Pre-assessment (one question/skill-many questions/skills)
- Could take many forms:
Multiple choice
Short answer, fill in answers
More extensive writing, drawing, mapping, etc.
• Between classes
Diagnostic Questions: carefully crafted questions that provide information which informs
immediate next steps in learning. Good diagnostic questions:
- Assess understanding of a learning target
- Uncover student misconceptions
- Make it unlikely that students could get the correct answer for the wrong reason
-Elicit a response from all students
-Results in instructional action
• Within a lesson
- A crucial component of formative assessment is that you need to see ALL students thinking.
- Formative assessment is not for grading – doesn’t mean you can’t “score” them (if that fits the
assignment) but it shouldn’t count against students.
- The assessment should be formative for the educator AND the student – students need
feedback.

Practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is
elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next
steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have
taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited (Black & Wiliam, 2009).

How to apply assessment in Arts? You need to consider the following:

Rich & Affirming Learning Environments

Create a safe, affirming, and enriched environment for participatory and inclusive learning in
and through the visual and performing arts for every group of students.

Empowering Pedagogy
Use culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy that maximizes learning in and through the
visual and performing arts, actively accesses and develops student voice, and provides opportunities for
leadership for every group of students.

Challenging & Relevant Curriculum

Engage every group of students in comprehensive, well-articulated and age-appropriate visual
and performing arts curriculum that also purposefully builds a full range of language, literacy, and other
content area skills, including whenever possible, bilingualism, biliteracy, and multiculturalism. This
curriculum is cognitively complex, coherent, relevant, and challenging.
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Lungsod ng Batangas
Colegio ng Lungsod ng Batangas
Contact No. (043) 402-1450

High Quality Instructional Resources

Provide and utilize high quality standards-aligned visual and performing arts instructional
resources that provide each group of students with equitable access to core curriculum and academic
language in the classroom, school, and community.

Valid & Comprehensive Assessment

Build and implement valid and comprehensive visual and performing arts assessment systems
designed to promote reflective practice and data-driven planning in order to improve academic,
linguistic, and sociocultural outcomes for each specific group of students.
Suggested Arts Resource Guide
This guide is intended to illustrate the process of assessment in the arts at the school level.
There are many resources for teachers and schools to use in classroom assessment of the arts. But there
are not many resources for district-wide assessment. This guide intends to address that gap.
District-wide assessment provides data about achievement. It gives feedback to parents and
teachers. And it offers information to the larger community about the progress of our students. Our
hope is to provide you with an accessible and informative guide to district-wide assessment. To that
purpose, this guide is chockfull of arts assessment resources both in print and online.
It provides examples from districts that are successfully assessing the arts and answers
“frequently asked questions,” as well as outlining the process of planning and implementing arts
assessment across a school district.
The guide begins with the basics by answering the following questions:
What is good arts assessment?
What does quality arts education assessment look like?
This section also describes formative, summative and authentic
assessment.
Next, the guide addresses four myths about arts assessment. The four myths are:
• Success in arts is subjective.
• It is all about the end product.
• Teachers can just tack on assessment to their arts instruction.
• Assessment is contradictory to the artistic process
The guide debunks each myth, then goes on to highlight examples of large-scale arts assessment at the
district, state and national levels. Next, the guide describes how to plan an arts assessment system in
your district. It can help you assemble a planning committee, be clear about what you want to
accomplish with assessment in the arts, establish parameters for your assessment