PreConference

Good morning.
“And the beat goes on……………”

The Arts Education PreConference

Sunday was a glorious day in downtown Chicago. Blue skies, sunshine. What an absolutely spectacular city.

The Arts Ed PreConference centered on one of the more difficult challenges of this area – assessment – of student learning and by implication, teaching models and methodologies. The day was split into two parts with the morning focus on the conceptual and theoretical aspects if Basic Assessment 101 – a quick and concise tutorial on the central elements of assessment by Professor Janmes Pelligrino of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who advised the atttendees to:

Be assessment ‘literate’ and focus on how the arts can be part of the dialogue of quality assessment in support of teaching and learning; and To ask: “What is the nature if competence in the arts on learning progressions.”

Basically “assessment” refers to a process of gathering information for purposes of making judgments about the current state of affairs of something. In education, it helps teachers, administrators, parents, the public and students to infer what students know about a subject and how well they know it. That information is useful on the classroom, district, and state / nation levels to assist learning, measure individual achievement and evaluate programs. There are different assessments for different needs and purposes, and those differing approaches must be coordinated, integrated, and synchronized to reach reasonable conclusions.

The quality of assessment data depends on both its reliability (is it consistent and comparable) and it’s validity (is there empirical evidence that it measures what it means to measure). We tend ti emphasize its reliability over its validity because of our preference for things we can more easily measure. And often users of valid assessments, use it in invalid ways.

Dr. Pelligrino advised that new federal government cash incentives have sparked ambitious and rigorous attempts to develop new, improved assessment protocols with unified standards, but that implementation of these ideals is likely problematic because of the politics of their adoption at all levels -local, state and in particular the federal level. Irrespective of the arts’ continuing place as the step child to english language skills, and both math and science proficiency- assessment reform – incentivized, but also held hostage by the money on the table likely has no chance for its redesign to be implemented.

The fact is much of this current effort is reinventing the wheel. In many jurisdictions, the arts have already developed both standards and assessment protocols that are intelligent, sophisticated, well thought out and constructed. What is missing is the measurement of the effect of the arts on those areas that are difficutt, if not impossible ti measure – the impact on creative – out-of-the-box thinking and critical analysis – and how learning in the arts help learning in other areas. How do you measure what arts experiences have on how you approach problem solving as an abstract concept? How do you apply standard metrics to non-standard assessments?

The arts are unlike math, unlike science. Measuring our impact isn’t so easy. The arts teach thinking that transcends multiple levels of knowledge and competency. As Dennie Palmer Wolf pointed out: the arts involve “imagining the world differently” – while assessment is on technical competency. You can assess a musician’s technical skill, but musicians themselves judge each other on much deeper leverls, and Dennie encouraged us to expand what arts education involves to include a wider range of skills enhancement, and to move away from the trap of assessing arts on its promise to improve academic performance – a trap we fall into when making the case for our value. She also cautioned that the emphasis on english / math / science skills made arts assessment an often after thought and that unless local funders invest in assessment, it won’t happen.

Julie Fry of the Hewlett Foundation noted a huge gap for funders when she observed that in San Francisco 67% of their grantees have substantial arts education outreach programs – in school, after school and otherwise and those organizations have neither the resources nor the expertise to “assess” student learning based on their experiences in those specific programs, nor any way to track those students over time to learn the longer term imnpacts. That is a problem for the organizations and their funders.

But the ultimate challenge for the arts isn’t in creating smart assessment protocols. The real challenge is in their timely and consistent application. The devil remains in the details.