Musical Assessment and Professional Productivity with Technology

According to Marzano (2006, as cited in Bauer, 2014) assessment should be a tool for students to improve. Assessment should also be frequent precisely because, under the previous logic, it is a formative tool more than it is supposed to be an approve/fail denominator. Assessments are also to help teachers to make informed decisions on the methodologies to be used to make her classes more effective.

Summative assessment can is also an important formative tool, although in this case assessment is used to measure in what degree students have learned or acquired a specific skill or knowledge. Nevertheless, the final outcome of a summative assessment should not only be about the student achievement, but of the process in general, including the methodologies used by the teacher. One question that always haunt me is if what we are measuring in a specific unit is actually relevant or a necessary step before other learning can take place. I have found that in some cases, my understanding of the different stages to be considered to acquire a skill or knowledge fails to represents the stages some students may go through when doing so. When that happens, I wonder if by using summative assessment as a pass/no-pass denominator we are helping or actually contriving their possibilities to learn.

Last week, when checking on my Facebook account, I saw something really interesting, although I have not searched for academic articles on it. It was a story about some mother who was trying to help her child to acquire the necessary motor skills to be able to write. She would have the child to draw circles and straight lines, and using a pen with green ink she circled the best examples that her child had drawn. What is interesting in this story is that through this method she was evaluating, but not focusing on the things her child was doing wrong. Instead she focused on what the child was doing well.

According to the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL, as cited in Bauer, 2014) organization, feedback should be corrective in nature. What troubles me about the McREL statement is that I can only understand as corrective an action that is focused on an issue, and that then corrects the issue.  When I think on the green ink story, I come to the conclusion that maybe focusing on the positive aspects, on the positive things we can get from assessment, we indirectly encourage our students to reflect on their performance in a way that they can discover for themselves what they have issues with­ (instead of pointing them out their mistakes). Evaluation is a complex process, and I advocate constant reflection on it.

Technology can be a friend when trying to expand our assessment tools’ repertoire. We can use diverse applications and games to assess music-performance skills and music theory understanding, and the best is that, through games, we reinforce the positive outcome, instead of pointing at the students mistakes. We can also use some web apps to create our own quizzes or surveys. Using google forms, we can design quizzes that can be taken by our students when they feel like to, and have them to share their thoughts. Google forms automatically records the respondent's answers, and the teacher can access a summary of all the answers either in a web page or in a sheet similar to those of Microsoft Excel.

This is a small survey I created using Google Forms. Feel free to take it and share your comments.




I personally think teachers should take advantage of these tools. There are many web apps that are free-access, and that allow us to improve not only to assess our students' progress, but also to organize better our assessment and our productivity. Google apps are free to access and provide many practical tools, such as calendars, text processors, presentation processors, and more. There are also other web apps that are specially designed for educators, though most of them are paid.

Please, share your favorite apps with me in the comments section!!!!!

Instructional Design and Technology

This week we will discuss instructional design. Departing from the constructionist theories of Vygotsky (1978) and the descriptions by Discoll (2002), Bauer (2014) understands learning as contextual, active, social, and reflective. Contextual because we construct knowledge by associating new elements with what we already know. Active, because the process is an active construction, as opposed to some kind of one-directional stream of content that goes into our brains and stays there through constant drilling. Paulo Freire (1970) described the later example the “banking” mode for learning, in which educators are the ones who have all that is to be learned and they deliver it to students, who are supposed to be blank slates.  Social, because we learn through interactions with others, such as modeling, and because in isolation the important element of affect would be missing. And reflective because it involves thinking over what we know and being flexible to modify our beliefs once we have constructed them. In Freire’s though, the connection between practical knowledge, theory, and reflection, is called praxis (Freire, 1970).

The belief that learning is contextual, active, social, and reflective is fundamental for the development of critical pedagogy, which is an application of critical thinking (the Frankfurt school tradition) to education (see Giroux, 2007; and Freire 1970). I found this connection particularly meaningful because, as critical pedagogy states “education is not neutral” and that “it is impossible to separate what we do in the classroom from the economic and political conditions that shape our work” (Giroux, 2007, pp. 2–3). Is in the mood of that statement that I found that to understand learning as contextual, active, social, and reflective is politically compromised with democracy.

Click on the picture to go to Paulo Freire Institute website, where you can find more information about Critical Pedagogy and Paulo Freire.

Technology can help educators to make encourage contextual, active, asocial, and reflective learning by making it an active and personalized process in which the student is able to make important decisions on the content and the methods of her own learning process. Using guided inquiry processes such as WebQuests, educators can stimulate students to find their own paths to a specific content. The use of instructional software is also a way in which students can personalize their learning process (especially in music education). The ability to share information also makes technology suitable to make the learning process social, and through the sharing of feedback, it also helps to make it reflective. All mentioned affordances of technology in learning do not mean that technology based or assisted learning is the only or the best alternative, but as educators is one alternative we have to be aware of.

Project Based Learning (PBL) is an approach to learning that also takes in account the contextual, active, social, and reflective characteristics of learning. In this approach, an issue is explored, and a project is proposed to be undertaken by the students and teachers. Different approaches to achieve the proposed outcome are explored and decisions are made in hands-on fashion. Finally, through the completion of the project, a number of varied learning outcomes are achieved. To be able to complete the projects, students have to recur to their own ingenuity, to their previous learning and experiences, to new theories, materials, and methods, engaging actively in a group effort which requires a great amount of reflection. Finally, specific contents are learned through a process that is closely related to a real-world experience, and therefore is meaningful. Technology can also be used in PBL, as WebQuests are designed as projects, although it differs to other PBL approaches in that the project is predetermined by its author instead of being proposed by students and teachers as a team.

To learn more about PBL, click on the picture.

Backward design is a concept that is fairly new to me. Being an educator, I have reviewed several planning approaches, and they all have something good you can learn from them. Usually, what I would do is to set up a learning outcome or goal, then an activity to achieve that goal, and then an evaluation system. In backward design, you start with the outcome, but then go immediately to the evaluation stage. Does it sound weird? Actually, now that I have thought about it, I think it is pretty logic. We know what we want to achieve, and it is logical to figure out the way in which we can know if students have learned, and then to think of how we can work our way to achieve those measurable behaviors (Bauer, 2014). When we leave assessment to the last part of our design, we are planning on activities to achieve an outcome, but we have not stated how that outcome will be manifest in an observable behavior. While it is true that every stage is connected, and that there is a certain statements of the observable behavior within our learning outcomes, by setting assessment as the second stage we are able to make more informed decisions when selecting our activities.

On the other hand, when stating an assessment level before setting our activities, we have to evaluate a product, which implies that the process itself is not the focus of assessment but it is a product-oriented process. Usually that is the case in music education that is performance based. In general music classroom, however, sometimes the process is more important than the outcome, especially since what we are attempting to do is to develop an affective response to music making. Again, it is not the only option, but is something we cannot just disregard as educators. In technology assisted learning modality, backwards design can be a particularly useful approach, especially since there is not the person to person contact that allows a teacher to assess the evolution of students regarding a specific issue.

If you are interested in learning more about backward design, you can watch the following video. Thanks for reading!