This book addresses the challenges faced by arts organizations, schools, and community-based settings when designing program evaluations and measuring artistic engagement and experience. With contributions from leaders in the field, this volume is an exemplary collection of complete program evaluations that assess music, theater, dance, multimedia, and the visual arts in a variety of contexts.
With the current emphases on standards and evidence-based learning, it's time to revisit the question of whether standards liberate or stifle excellence in arts education. Assessment in Arts Education examines the pressing issues that educators everywhere and at all levels face as they make determinations about progress and achievement in the arts. Assessment in Arts Education critiques the application of standards in arts education and the extent to which benchmarks and attainment levels are practically and educationally sensible. It opens up an interdisciplinary discussion on arts-education assessment and provides helpful advice for thinking about assessment and evaluation. Leaders in drama, music, dance, and the visual arts detail how they've navigated the issues around assessment and tackled tough questions such as: How do assessment models shape teaching in the arts? How much guidance should standards provide for arts educators? Who benefits from national and local assessment standards in the arts? What contributions have standards made to the teaching of the creative arts? Meet standards and assessment head on. Read Assessment in Arts Education and find evidence not only of how your students think and learn, but of how the entire community of arts educators has considered and acted on the demands of these educational times.
Social media have dramatically popularized practices of evaluation, especially of cultural products and artistic expressions. The practices of "liking" and rating any shared contents such as music to blogs, film, videos, photographs to artwork and performances are ubiquitous in today’s digital environments. As a result, creative producers are increasingly developing reputations and careers through a complex blend of online social reputation management and distribution platforms, and more longstanding forms of marketing channels and professional evaluation. In this context, Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts seeks to examine the newly emerging forms of evaluation, such as contests, competitions, ranking, commenting, liking, and rating, which are taking place in digital environments. In doing so, this book investigates the criteria and assessment practices tied to the evaluation of creativity and artistic works and further questions what is at stake when digital environments heighten the role of amateur and peer criticism to the level of expert critiques. While exploring potential informal learning opportunities and offering incisive critiques on the emerging norms and standards of evaluation, the essays in this book cover a wide range of artistic and creative practices.
Assessing Expressive Learning is the only book in the art education field to date to propose and support a research-supported teacher-directed authentic assessment model for evaluating K-12 studio art, and to offer practical information on how to implement the model. This practical text for developing visual arts assessment for grades 1-12 is based on and supported by the results of a year-long research effort primarily sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, involving 70 art teachers and 1,500 students in 12 school districts in Florida, Indiana, and Illinois. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate that creative artwork by K-12 students can be empirically assessed using quantitative measures that are consistent with the philosophical assumptions of authentic learning and with the means and ends of art, and that these measures can reliably assess student art growth. A further goal was to provide a rationale for the assessment of student art as an essential part of the K-12 instructional program and to encourage art teachers to take responsibility for and assume a leadership role in the assessment of art learning in the school and the school district. Assessing Expressive Learning: *reports on current assessment methods but also stresses a time-tested portfolio assessment process that can be used or adapted for use in any K-12 art classroom; *includes the assessment instruments used in the study and several case studies of art teachers using electronic portfolios of student work, a bibliography of major art assessment efforts, and a critical review of current methods; *is designed to be teacher- and system-friendly, unlike many other art assessment publications that provide only a review of information on assessment; and *both documents an experiment where artistic values and aesthetic issues were considered paramount in the education of K-12 students in the visual arts, and also serves as a guide for the conduct of similar experiments by art teachers in the nation's schools--the research methodology and results are reported in an appendix in a format that will enable educational researchers to duplicate the study. This volume is ideal as a text for upper-division undergraduate and graduate classes in visual arts education assessment, and highly relevant for college art education professors, researchers, and school district personnel involved in the education and supervision of art teachers, and researchers interested in performance measurement.
This second edition follows the tradition of the first edition as both an introductory text and a handbook in evaluation and assessment in the creative arts therapies. It was written to be useful both for graduate students in the arts therapies training programs, doctoral programs, and for practitioners in the field who want guidelines for developing and implementing evaluation programs. The first section deals with fundamentals and principles that apply to all evaluation, qualitative as well as quantitative. This general treatment is followed by chapters that deal with specific approaches to evaluation: psychometric, clinical or intuitive, and behavioral. The implications for evaluation of the three major philosophical orientations (psychodynamic, existential, and behavioral) are discussed. The last section focuses on evaluation procedures in art therapy, dance/movement therapy, and music therapy, contributed by individuals who have specific expertise in those areas. Existing procedures are reviewed and emerging trends are examined. The basic theme of the book is the interrelationship between the creative and the scientific approaches to evaluation. The book’s purpose is not to provide formulas or recipes but rather to help therapists relate their evaluation program to their goals, to identify what they are interested in evaluating, and to design the kind of evaluation program that can do what the therapist wants it to do.
The Art of Evaluation is essential reading for educators and prospective educators who are concerned about the critical role of evaluation in the learning process and want to know how to improve their own assessment approaches and enable learners to assume active, meaningful roles in evaluating their own learning. An instructor can know all there is to know about evaluation and still have a difficult time evaluating students well. This book offers practical ways to plan evaluation and develop tools to record and report learner growth. The underlying theme is that good evaluation involves the learner throughout the whole learning experience and is not simply a judgment by an instructor at the end of a course. The book systematically reviews many aspects of learner evaluation from different perspectives and provides practical suggestions about how to conduct evaluation in different contexts to benefit all concerned. This book is intended as an introduction to learner evaluation in various contexts of adult education. We have attempted to address issues and provide examples that would fit the interests of students of adult education, new college and university teachers, trainers in business and government and consultants whose work involves learner evaluation. Every educator works within a unique context of learners, purposes, structures, and cultures. Every reader, therefore, needs to be critical and selective when choosing among the materials offered in this book. Some of it will suit you, some may not fit your philosophy or your situation, and some will need adaptation to be useful in your work.
Evaluating Creative Practice discusses: *the function of evaluation in general *the role of formal assessment and its relation with informal evaluation *the role of the audience for the creative product *the value of making within the subject discipline *the balance within the subject paid to product and process *the role of reflection and the place of the students voice. Examples of practice from subject disciplines English, Art, Music, Drama, Media Studies, Design and Technology, Gallery Education and Digital Arts will enable those involved with primary, secondary, further, higher, gallery and community education to learn from each other and to develop a coherent approach to the range of creative work produced by young people. By focusing on questions of evaluation and containing a range of practical examples the book sets an agenda for creative work by young people in the school curriculum and beyond.
