With the increase in assessment demands across the country, it is important that music educators be well versed in why and how to properly evaluate and assess their students. Accountability is not leaving our public schools anytime soon, and the more well versed we, as music educators, can be the better.  It’s also important to the quality of our teaching, as we need to both continually and summarily evaluate student learning in our classrooms.

Ryan Sargent had a great post over at the SmartMusic blog introducing summative and formative assessment, which you can find here.  Additionally, Pete Miksza has a post describing a session he moderated regarding assessment with some materials.  Finally, if you would like a summary of much of the research perspectives, I’ve recently published a paper addressing research regarding assessment in music for practitioners.