Introduction

Good teaching integrates assessment into the lesson for the benefit of the student and the planning process of the teacher. Good assessment includes a variety of ways of appraising student work and achievement, including: performance assessment as well as forced choice testing often used in the arts as accountability measures.

Arts educators routinely make performance assessments of their students' dance, music, theater and visual arts work. They are leading the way as schools seek to "authentically" test student work, but a recent survey by Dr. Gretchen Boyer, NAU, suggests that Arizona arts specialists:

• feel they don't have time for formal assessments
  
• focus on oral feedback to students, not committing the assessment to paper
  
• focus on performance skills, slighting the very important new standards dealing with inquiry/criticism and arts in context/history
  
• do less with student portfolios than anticipated.

All Arizona teaching examples, gathered here, were presented on the Interactive Television Conferences organized by the Arizona Alliance for Arts Education. The October 1999 and 2000 events were hosted by Northern Arizona University. You can access the examples with the links on the left side of this page.

If you have examples of assessment procedures or test items that you feel will help other teachers, please send them to us at: lin.wright@asu.edu

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