Measuring Student Academic Growth in the Instrumental Classroom
Recent tenure reform requires all school districts in Michigan to implement a rigor- ous, transparent, and fair performance evalu- ation system that establishes clear approaches for measuring and collecting data on student growth and using this information to evaluate teachers’ job performance (PA 102, 2011). Al- though administrators likely will utilize scores from state and national tests to evaluate teach- ers in core subjects, music educators will prob- ably need to create local assessments because few standardized measures exist in music. The purpose of this article is the examine different methods for assessing student growth in the instrumental classroom that will not only sat- isfy new requirements, but hopefully improve instruction and enhance learning for band and orchestra students throughout the state.
Basic Principles
The new legislation requires teachers to consid- er a number of factors when designing assess- ments for academic growth. Music educators should assess individual progress through mul- tiple measures related to performance, knowl- edge, understanding, and response. Large- group assessments (e.g., festival ratings) also may be appropriate on a limited basis provided other measures focus on individual student achievement. In order to establish a baseline, assessments should occur at two points in time through pre- and post-tests. The difference between the pre- and post-test scores repre- sents the amount of academic growth for each student or large-ensemble. It is sometimes unnecessary to construct a pre-test if students take the same measure of progress one or more times per year. For example, a performance test administered at the end of one school year could serve as the pre-test for the following year. In this case, a student who earns the same score on these two exams would demonstrate growth if the tests were increasingly challeng- ing.
Phillip M. Hash
The law leaves the exact number of measures teachers should give opened to interpretation. However, any assessment system should be manageable and contribute to the effectiveness of the curriculum. Not all measures have to contribute to an instructor’s evaluation data. Three specific assessments designed for this purpose per year is probably enough, provided they measure a broad range of learning. Fur- thermore, assessments used to generate data for teacher evaluation need not include every grade level or figure into students’ final course grades. Band and orchestra members may respond better to individual testing without the pressure of maintaining their standing in class. Some learners, however, may take these assess- ments more seriously if results also influence grades.
One purpose of tenure reform is to compare job performance among teachers in order to make high-stakes decisions regarding retention, pay, and assignment. Therefore, student growth data should derive from the same assessments for all teachers of a particular subject area within a school system and involve the use of valid and reliable measurements. Valid- ity refers to the extent to which an assessment measures what it claims to measure. Assess- ments that demonstrate a high level of valid- ity often are those that are authentic in that they engage students in relevant, real world, performance-based tasks and problem solving (Moon, Brighton, & Robinson, 2005). A test of students’ ability to perform 12 major scales that simply involves writing them out is not a valid or authentic measure of this skill. A valid assessment would require students’ to perform the scales in relation to specific objectives connected with the task (e.g., tempo, range, articulation).
Reliability refers to the ability of an assess- ment to deliver consistent results every time. A rating scale on a playing test would be reliable
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