A Short Guide to Alternative Assessment Practices

Abstract

Over the past decade, assessment in the arts has become the object of increasingly close scrutiny in North America. That state of affairs in which classroom teachers made their own unchallenged judgments about the artistic ability of their students has been challenged by the possibility of creating statewide benchmarks for performance. The rhetoric associated with state-wide assessment has outstripped delivery in at least two ways. First, the achievement of state-wide measures of performance remains largely unsustained. Finlayson (1989) noted that in the late 1980s, only twelve states, and the District of Columbia, in the United States purported to conduct state level visual art assessment, and of those thirteen, only six had actually developed standardized instruments. No comparable data exist in Canada, because province-wide testing in the arts has never been attempted. Second, the presence of tests is no guarantee of their quality. In one supersession at the NAEA conference in Atlanta, in 1991, the audience was treated to some pitiable evidence of what art assessment means in some states where paper-and-pencil tests are employed. Asked to promote and support what sometimes seems a trivial pursuit, teachers may understandably react as Karen does: a teacher in New York, and the central figure in a case study on school assessment practices, she refuses to emphasize the tests during the year, gives them back with barely disguised distaste, and pays no attention to the results (Jervis, 1991, p. 19).

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