(Based on: Designing Assessment in Art, Carmen L. Armstrong, NAEA and the PTA Glossary)

Assessment: The process of judging student behavior or product in terms of some criteria (Clark, 1975). It includes various means of gathering information about the quantity, quality and progress of students, their performance/studio and academic work. Assessment may include objective tests as well as the use of rating scales, observation checklists, content analysis, interviews based on performances, discussions and written assignments. Assessment is generally ongoing and occurs during the learning process. It often has a formative element, intended to aid learning, add to Lesson Plans and guide the students. Assessment often offers feedback to the student and/or the teacher. Individuals are assessed, but responses are summarized to ascertain achievement of groups or subgroups of students.

Evaluation: A judgment of merit based on various measurements, notable events, and subjective impressions. A total art program evaluation assesses the quality of components such as facilities, resources, teacher preparation, extra- curricular art activities, or safety in the art room or performance facility, and includes curriculum evaluation and the program for assessment of student learning. Assessment of student learning in the arts can lead to refining or reinforcing curriculum (what is taught, when) and Lesson Plans (how). (See Figure G.1. as a demonstration of how arts programs operate within the context of the community and the state.)

Achievement: Ability to demonstrate accomplishment of some outcome for which learning experiences were designed.

Alternative assessment: Nontraditional means of recording evidence of learning, such as coding live art criticism discussions , portfolio reviews, rating performances or art products on criteria established by teachers and students, journals, authentic task assessment. Entails direct observation of student performance.

Authentic assessment: Assessment that fits meaningful, real- life learning experiences. It includes recording evidence of the learning process, applications in products and performances, perception of visual and audio relationships, integrations of new knowledge, reflecting profitably on one's own progress, and interpreting meaning in consideration of contextual facts.

Bench Mark: Exemplary samples of performance or production.

Criterion: A behavior, characteristic, or quality of a product or performance about which some judgment is made (Clark, 1975). It represents what a teacher intended to teach and what is checked to see if students did indeed learn what the teacher thought was taught.

Criterion-referenced assessment: "A score that compares a student's performance to specific standards." The student is assessed in reference to some student outcome that can be expected as a result of an education experience (i.e., a degree of mastery of identified criteria. Criteria are qualities that can provide evidence of achievement of goals or outcomes, such as comprehension of concepts introduced or reinforced, a kind of inquiry behavior encouraged, or a technique practiced for its potential contribution to the skill of the artist/student or the meaning/communication of the art work. It makes sense to assess in terms of what a teacher believes was taught.

Formative and Summative evaluation: Formative evaluation is the process of judging an ongoing, changing process or product for diagnosis, revision, description, information, or comparison. Summative evaluation, a final-end judgement serving purposes of persuasion, verification, prediction or validity.

Goals: Statements of expectations of general capabilities or student outcomes resulting from planned educational experiences. General educational goals refer to state or district goals for all students. Art goals can refer to state, district, teacher-planned, or teacher/student-planned expectations for student learning (i.e., student outcomes that will result from the planned experiences in the arts). Lesson Plan goals refer to what the teacher will do in order to facilitate that student outcome. An objective, in terms of student behavior, delineates a more focused outcome than a goal (i.e., a breakdown of a general goal statement) but does not refer to the over specification of minute enabling behaviors (i.e. each performance or manipulative skill).

High stakes assessment: When assessment results are tied to student graduation or to funding for schools from states or other agencies. When states base their judgement prematurely on a statewide test, what is testable on that one-shot instrument tends to drive the Lesson Plans if results are to be published and schools compared.

Higher order thinking: A complex level of thinking that entails analyzing and classifying or organizing perceived qualities or relationships, meaningfully combining concepts and principles verbally or in the production of art works or performances, and then synthesizing ideas into supportable, encompassing thoughts or generalizations that hold true for many situations.

Instrument or assessment tool: A method of gathering data about student performance. In the arts this could be a questionnaire, a test, a checklist of stages in solving a problem, or a criterion-referenced rating scale for an art product or performance.

Measurement: May be a frequency count of kinds of responses, a rating indicating the level of attainment of a desired quality, or the percentage of correct answers on a multiple choice test and so forth.

In criterion-referenced assessment, assessment is specified as degrees of attainment (a score or a rating) based on what is possible. The degrees may be stated in terms of percentages of attainment along the continuum or section of a continuum (what can be expected for a particular grade level), where the continuum represents ultimate mastery of the criterion.

Norm group: The group used as a point of comparison for a test.

Norm-referenced testing: A score that compares a student's performance to that of people in a norm group.

Ongoing assessment: Tracks student learning by performance on tasks that are part of the natural Lesson Plan process. Ongoing assessment, producing samples of work clustered by the outcome demonstrated, provides accumulated data for summative analysis.

Outcome: A successful culmination of a cluster of integrated learning experiences. It involves correct application and synthesis beyond direct Lesson Plans.

Performance assessment: An observation of the process of creating an answer or product that demonstrates a student's knowledge and/or skills. Directly observable, student- generated evidence of learning (e.g., creating a woven basket, performing a dance or a monologue, singing a song, providing good reasons why a performance or work of art has merit, interpreting a work of art or performance.)

Portfolios: Collections of students' work over a period of time. Examples might be a videotape of participation in an art criticism experience; a video or audio tape of a dance, music or theater performance; a painting; sketches that record the preliminary thinking process for an environmental art work; a journal that records the rehearsal process for a performance or of ideas and experiences that provide insight about the process of writing a play, choreographing a dance, or composing a piece of music; essays and tests; teacher notations from a log book and classroom interaction checklist results. A portfolio should be more than just a collection of work; it should demonstrate the student's learning process and the student's conscious involvement in that process.

Reliability: An indication of how consistent test scores will be, given different testing conditions or editions of a test. A test or measure is reliable when it is consistent (i.e., repeated measurements would show the same achievement or several observers of a classroom situation would closely agree with ratings recorded for individuals on the same criterion).

Rubric: A brief statement describing a certain quantity or quality of work, learning or behavior. Rubrics are often organized in descending order, with statements describing, for example, excellent behavior, good behavior, acceptable behavior, and poor behavior.

Standardized test: A test that is administered and scored under the same conditions for all students.

Stanine score: A score from a nine-point scale used in standardized tests.

Traditional assessment: Traditional assessment instruments refer to forced-choice, machine-scorable, pencil-and-paper tests (e.g. matching, true-false, multiple choice) and restricted- completion, short-answer, or essay questions.

Validity: The extent to which test scores actually reflect what they were meant to measure. Validity occurs when the assessment procedure measures the performance described in the objective, that is what it claims to measure.