Assessment Commentary

Throughout the series of lessons, three assessment strategies were used. The
first was a pre-listening test at the very beginning of the lessons. No information was
given to students except the title of the piece. The only directions that were given were
to write whatever came to mind and to be as descriptive as possible. The goal of this
assessment was to learn where students were at when it came to listening to music
critically. Students were graded through a rubric that had three categories; describing
musical basics, describing musical phrasing, and the main aspects of listening. In the
first category fourteen out of fifteen students scored a four or lower. In the second
category twelve out of fifteen students scored a three or lower. In the final category
twelve out of fifteen students scored a three or lower. I expected students to score
relatively low on the pre-test because I purposefully chose to include less information to
have a more accurate representation of student’s abilities.
The second way I assessed student learning was through informal assessment.
A lot of this assessment was me walking around while students were creating their
stories or soundtracks and listening in to students thought process. As I walked around,
I would also ask students questions like, “what concrete musical ideas helped influence
your story”. This specific question gave me insight to what students were listening for in
the music, whether it was a string melody or trumpet solo. I asked this question because
of the results of the pre-test. I found that many students could describe the emotion of
the piece but not the musical ideas that influenced that decision. In the third lesson, I
found that more students could accurately describe musical ideas that influenced
decisions in their story.
The final way I assessed student learning was through a post-test. At the end of
the third lesson I gave students a final listening test with more defined expectations. The
first way I communicated my expectations was defining what students should write
about on this test. I wrote on a slide the three categories of the rubric and told students
they should focus on those categories in their post-test. I also showed students the
rubric on a separate slide and told them that I would be evaluating their test based off of
it.
Results of the post-test were much greater than that of the pre-test. In the first
category, fourteen out of fifteen students scored a five out of five. In the second
category, fourteen out of fifteen students scored a five out of five. In the final category,
thirteen out of fifteen students scored a five out of five. No student on the post-test
scored lower than a three.
The expectation of this series of lessons was to have students be able to use
concrete musical ideas, such as melody, harmony, style, etc. to communicate the
emotion of the piece. By the end of the lesson, as demonstrated through the results of
the post-test, almost all of the students were able to accomplish this overall learning
target.