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!!!!!