Assessments in the Classroom

Assessments are an important aspect of what educators do to measure a students growth throughout the duration of a class. The most common assessments that all educators are familiar with are formative assessments and summative assessments. Bauer (2014) says that formative assessment "involves both formal and informal procedures that provide information for the teacher and feedback to the student during the learning process" (p. 133). For example, if a section of students play a particular part of the music, and then immediate feedback is provided, informal assessment is taking place. Summative assessments, however, "summarizes learning at a particular point in time, typically at the end of a project, unit, semester, or entire class (Bauer, 2014, p. 133) Concerts, performances, and/or performance exams at the end of each semester are excellent forms of summative assessment for band and choir teachers. It is very important for educators to use authentic assessments, which requires the performance of a task rather a response on a paper, because it provides evidence of a students understanding for a musical task and/or learning outcome.

In recent years, technology has helped teachers make assessments more reliable and convenient to grade. Word processors such as Microsoft Word, and now Google Docs and Forms, have provided educators the opportunity to easily create rubrics for grading performance-based tests. The best part about these technologies is that they can easily be adjusted and altered for improvement for future years of use. Google Forms and Docs can also easily be shared to large groups of people and can be used to either survey or assess students. This allows students to complete tests from home, school, or anywhere they may have internet access. Other technologies such as metronome and tuner apps, Audacity, Floobaroo, Webquest, and many more open source software are available. Most of which are easy to use and extremely beneficial to both educators and students.

The most important part of assessing students for educators is that they use a reliable rubric. Rubrics use a rating scale and provides expectations and descriptions of the various levels of achievement. The descriptions make assessment more reliable and consistent, but as Bauer (2014) mentions, "they also provide valuable feedback to students on why they were rated on a certain level" (p. 138). Students can use this information as they are producing their product as self-assessment and can decide what needs to be done to reach desired achievement levels. High quality rubrics that are detailed, specific, and reliable will help to keep educators consistent and will eliminate many questions about fairness by students and parents.

It has been my experience that rubrics are incredibly beneficial to both my students and me. Though it is intentional, it is was very easy to grade students using bias instead of grading the quality of the work. Without a rubric, it was also easy for me to accidentally grade students differently between multiple grading sessions because my demeanor changed or I  forgot how detailed I was, or was not being. This was not fair to my students and they realized the inconsistencies and started asking a lot of questions about their performance and why someone did better than them. The introduction of rubrics has solved most of these issues and the students have worked harder to achieve the level of performance they were accepting of.