Pre-assessment is
an important tool for educators that allows them to determine a class or
individual’s preparedness for a lesson, unit, or instructional activity. It
also helps instructors to make judgments about the effectiveness of previous
lessons and activities in developing skill sets and knowledge required for
future lessons. A pre-assessment can take many forms, from quizzes and tests on
the formal side to discussions and observations on the informal side. In music,
pre-assessments tend to be informal, but can be of varying degrees of formality
for units in which the instructor does not have adequate data to understand the
instructional needs of the class.
I. “Hearing the
System” Pre-assessment
The pre-assessment chosen for
testing is a pre-assessment used on the first day of a planned two-week (or
5-10 lesson) unit that explores the tonal system, scales, and basic music
composition. The pre-assessment is intended to help the instructor understand
the aural identification skills of the class as well as prepare the class for a
lesson that is listening intensive. It is informal as originally written.
A. Procedure
The instructor plays recordings, or
alternately performs on his instrument, a series of pieces that are in either
major or minor tonality. The class is asked to respond to these examples first
by identifying the differences between the major and minor pieces and then by describing
the emotional effect of the music directly. The instructor will write the
adjectives use on the board and follow the students instructions as to which
descriptors apply to which pieces.
By the end of the pre-assessment the
instructor should have a general idea of the class’s ability to identify the
differences between major and minor aurally.
B. Justification
Instruction in music is often an
ongoing and many-tiered operation, with pre-assessments directly testing
(usually informally) the progress of the class in technique and concert
preparedness. In this sense a single pre-assessment may not have as much
meaning as a week’s worth. The pre-assessment used was chosen because it is a
break from the usual warm-ups that are used as music pre-assessments and
because it tests a set of aural skills that are not often assessed in the
course of ensemble music and might therefore be an unknown to the instructor.
C. Mastery Rubric
The pre-assessment uses a “mastery
rubric” designed by the instructor and intended for use in determining
proficiency, preparedness, and mastery of the class as a whole. The entire rubric is reproduced below, but
the “Theory and concepts” section is used for this pre-assessment.
Beginning
|
Below basic
|
Basic
|
Proficient
|
Mastery
|
|
Techniques
|
A few students are able to perform the technique,
but most have difficulty performing it on command. Using the technique in
time is very difficult.
|
Less than half the students are able to perform
the technique, with or without prompting from the instructor. Using the
technique with rhythmic accuracy is difficult.
|
More than half the students can perform the
technique with prompting. Using the technique with rhythmic accuracy is
possible, but some students still struggle.
|
At least have the students can perform the
technique without prompting, and almost all of the remainder can perform it
with prompts and corrections. Very few, if any, students struggle. The
technique can be performed well with rhythmic accuracy.
|
Almost all of the students can perform the
technique without prompting. Using the technique in time is very easy for the
class. Few, if any, students require any sort of prompting.
|
Theory and concepts
|
Very few of the students are able to define
concepts in their own words or
correctly apply theory.
|
Less than half of the students are able to define
concepts in their own words or correctly apply theory.
|
More than half of the students are able to define
concepts in their own words and many students can correctly apply theory.
|
The majority of students are able to define
concepts in their own words. They are able to draw connections to other
concepts and can apply theory to music well through composition and
performance.
|
Almost all of the students are able to define
concepts accurately as well as draw connections to other concepts. Those who
cannot do so are still able to define
terms well enough for examinations. Almost all of the students are capable of
using music theory in their own performances.
|
Performance pieces
|
The class cannot yet play the piece with rhythmic
accuracy or may need frequent prompting to get the music right. They may be
playing one note at a time.
|
The class can play the piece very slowly, with
some prompting from the instructor to assist in accuracy. They cannot yet
play dynamics.
|
The class can play the piece with rhythmic
accuracy, though slightly slower than indicated. There are few missed notes.
Dynamics, if present, are inconsistent.
|
The class can play with both pitch and rhythmic
accuracy without prompting and at an appropriate tempo. Dynamics are used,
but expression is limited.
|
The class can play the whole piece accurately in
terms of pitch and rhythm at performance tempo. There are few missed notes.
The ensemble is able to use dynamics and other expressive techniques to full
effect.
|
II. Survey Group
A. Participants
The test group consists of five
individuals who take private guitar lessons and techniques classes. Their ages
are 12, 14, two 15, and 22 years, respectively. Their experience level ranges
from three months of study to four years. There was one female and four males.
B. Methodology
The participants were given the
pre-assessment in two different groups, one group of three individuals and one
group of two due to time constraints. Both groups were given the same set of
musical examples to consider in roughly the same amount of time. It should be
noted that in these cases it is easier to measure the preparedness of
individuals in such small groups compared to large guitar classes or bands and
choirs.
C. Materials
The recordings used in the
pre-assessment were, in order: Wolfgang Mozart, Symphony 25 in G minor, mvt. 1;
Beethoven symphony 9, mvt. 4; Heitor Villa-Lobos, prelude 5 for guitar;
Francisco Tarrega, “Los Recuerdos de la Alhambra” for guitar; J.S. Bach, Art of
the Fugue, contrapunctus 1; A.S. Weiss, Lute Sonata 25, Presto.
For each example, the first two
minutes is used in the interest of time.
III. Results
A. Performance According to the Rubric
With the five individuals who
participated, four were able to discern the difference between minor and major
by the second pair of examples, and the same four were all able to express the
effects of the music directly and in their own words. The one student who had
difficulty was able to grasp the difference between major and minor by the
final example, but was unable to describe the effect of any of the pieces. With
this in mind, the class achieved basic understanding, but if the outlying
student is excluded the other four participants were able to achieve proficiency
with the affective-response music activity.
B. Student Feedback
Most of the student feedback was
positive and reinforcing of one of the unit goals, which is to develop student
awareness of the tonal system and how it works. One piece of negative feedback
was in the choice of music, which was for this exercise made up of art music
that only ran until the early twentieth century and therefore unfamiliar to the
participants. There seemed to initially be some confusion with a few of the
students who thought that major and minor were concepts only applied to
classical music and not contemporary pop music.
One student that had difficulty
throughout the pre-assessment noted that although he interpreted emotions from
the performance of the pieces, he did not know just what they were or in what
words he should express them.
IV. Revisions
A. Formal vs. Informal
The current format of the
pre-assessment is informal, with a formal post-assessment scheduled for later
in the lesson. It occurred to me that the formality of the post-assessment,
which asks students to judge further examples to be major or minor, could be
used as a pre-assessment but without the need of identifying the tonal area.
Instead, students could be asked to write down a series of descriptive words or
statements about the examples to be collected and then shared, so that the
instructor would have written and concrete data on each individual’s skill set
and how that relates to the mastery rubric.
B. Materials Selection
According to the feedback of the
participants, the pre-assessment could more accurately gauge aural abilities by
including pieces of music that are familiar to students, either based on their
suggestions or drawn from commonly heard popular pieces. For extension
activities later in the lesson that apply the skill of identifying major and
minor unfamiliar pieces are still necessary.
C. Rubric
Currently, the rubric identifies
general points of mastery for gauging an entire class’s progression along a
line of theory and technique, but there is not an individual rubric for judging
the proficiency of individuals in the pre-assessment. Such an individual rubric
would be necessary if the pre-assessment was changed to be more formal. A
speculative individual rubric for the understanding of the lesson-specific
concepts is included below. With the use of this individual rubric, the
instructor will have a better understanding of the class’s progression toward
mastery of concepts.
(1)Beginning
|
(2)Below Basic
|
(3)Basic
|
(4)Proficient
|
(5)Mastery
|
|
Identification of Major and Minor
aurally
|
The student is not able to discern
the difference between major and minor aurally.
|
The student is able to correctly
identify the use of major and minor less than half of the time.
|
The student is able to correctly
identify the use of major and minor more than half the time
|
The student is able to correctly
identify the use of major or minor consistently, or more than 85% or the
time.
|
The student is able to correctly
identify the use of major and minor consistently, and is able to identify when a shift from major or minor to the
opposite system has occurred within a piece.
|
Affective response description
abilities
|
The student is unable to identify
any effects of a musical example.
|
The student is able to identify
basic emotions produced by a piece of music, such as happy and sad.
|
The student is able to identify
and describe general effects, such as “dark” and “bright” sounds.
|
The student is able to identify
and describe specific musical effects in his or her own words.
|
The student is able to tie effects
of music to specific musical events and is able to use his or her own words
to describe events.
|
The outcomes of the pre-assessment
could then be applied to a general understanding of mastery using mean
(average), median (middle score) and mode (most frequent score). The method for
finding the average is such:
1.
Assign each placement on the rubric a numerical value from 1-5, with 5 being
mastery.
2.
Average the numbers for the entire class.
3.
The number value represents where on the scale to mastery the class lies as a
whole for each of the two skill areas in the rubric.
An average does not need to be the
only method of determining class-wide mastery of concepts and skills, but may
be used to inform the instructor of both the long-term and short-term progress
of the class. Ideally, these numbers would be compared to the outcomes of the
post-assessment to gauge the effectiveness of the lesson for the whole class.
V. Conclusion
Though the struggling of one student
skewed slightly the considerations of the class toward mastery, the overall
response to the pre-assessment revealed a group of students were able and
willing to discern differences between tonal areas in music aurally, and were
able to express their responses to said music effectively. In a classroom
setting, the participants would be well-prepared for the lesson and the one to
two week unit that follow the tested pre-assessment.
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