HAT Journal #11

Summary:
            The goal of assessment is to meet state and national standards, provide
documentation for grades, improve individual musicianship, and to improve instruction.
Most teachers in the US tend to use assessment on non-achievement based criteria like
attendance which is a huge miss. The study that was held found that most grades that
were given out were based on non achievement which was true from what their
hypothesis was. Well other teachers would do 60% non achievement and 40%
achievement based grading. If you use a rating scale while grading your students, not
only will it give them a more accurate grade as to how they are doing but it will also give
you a realistic number on what you should be working with with that individual student.
This serves as a checklist to help monitor the students progress as well. In this article
there are plenty of tables and reading skills that are very effective. Women creating a
rubric, teachers should identify all constructs that lead to success in a given task, decide
how important each construct is keep the rubric easy, allow students to see the rubric
prior to the observation task, and focus the rubric items on observable phenomenon
such as physicality in you're playing rather than abstract concepts that they may choose
to demonstrate. The purpose of assessment in an informal setting should be happening
throughout every class to check on student progress as well to help gauge how you as an
educator are actively engaging your students to teach them lifelong lessons. Ensuring
that your assessments meet national state and school mandated standards is also quite
important. A good way to do this is to format your assessments in such a way that you
can adequately explain to your colleagues how the rubric is formatted, taking serious
assessment tools and evaluating individual learning skills, in collaborating with other
music educators to develop uniform assessment tools in your school, and reporting all of
your results to parents is a big one. Providing documentation for the grid is also a big
part of this. This entails that you should be not only listing the letter grade in the points
that were assigned to that letter grade, but also comments from the rubric because
numbers can't be justified through numbers. You have to justify numbers with words. To
improve your individual musicianship, teachers should seek out extra help when creating
their rubrics for assessment as to make your assessment more effective. Not only should
the students be assessed but the teachers should be assessed as well, Because we are
lifelong learners, the journey to become a better educator never stops
           
H

 I'm still confused as to why most educators choose to use non performance
based criteria to grade their students. It just is astonishing that they are willing
to let those grades go under the rug. Is it because the first thing that students
lose when they have bad grades is band?
  Article was talking about using observable characteristics of music to be
graded on however, the rubrics set otherwise. Some of the aspects of the
rubric were very clear on the physicality of playing but some were also just the
abstract activity of musicianship. It was just a tad confusing
 what are some other ways that you as an educator can be assessed. I know
that a lot of school districts do observations however, I feel that those are few
and far between and I would prefer to be constantly berated with things to
improve on so that I can deliver the best product to my students.

 
A

 it was very cool to see the importance of assessment in an entire article. I

definitely came from a band program where you just got on a unless you didn't
show up. This is a very cool way to keep your students accountable as well as
yourself.
 Having a very in depth rubric rather than just two or three sections on your
rubric does seem to be more beneficial from a concept standpoint than what
most teachers do. Being as detailed as possible with a lot of your comments
through the scoring will help them more than just telling them what is wrong.
 Self assessment and teacher assessment is also a very interesting aspect of
this article. I don't think we hear enough about teachers being assessed and I
think that should change.

 
T

 This article does a good job of giving plenty of examples of rubrics that I will
surely take the classroom. Introducing the physical aspects of playing is a bit
more of a string world thing however, it is still practical in a wind setting.
 The collaboration piece in this article it was very cool. Teachers helping
teachers beat teachers by collaborating and creating a standardized form of
assessment not only to get the students ready to be assessed however, but
also to create a consistent Avenue for improvement